Quotes About History

64 quotes

You find a stack of old letters in a drawer, and the handwriting pulls you back to a voice you almost remember. The dates are faded, but the arguments feel fresh. That is the moment history stops being a subject in school and becomes something you live with. It is the record of who held power and who stayed quiet, and also the story of who got to tell it.

Lenin saw the promise of freedom as a privilege of ownership, noting that liberty in his own time still belonged to slave owners. King watched the silence of ordinary people and called it the greatest tragedy of a social transition. Obama pointed out that colonialism did its worst damage by obscuring how people saw their own past. Confucius, who urged looking forward, knew the past could not be mended. The gap between what happened and what we are allowed to remember is where the choices get made.
Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

— The Critic as Artist

English author

Aren't you two ever going to read Hogwarts, A History?""What's the point?" said Ron. "You know it by heart, we can just ask you.

— Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Author, novelist, writer

We are all fools in love

— Pride and Prejudice

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

— Les Misérables

French philosopher, author, and journalist

You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history.

— A Happy Death

Russian author

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

— War and Peace

British writer and journalist

If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.

— 1984

Founding Father, U.S. president from 1801 to 1809

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

— Letters of Thomas Jefferson

English mystery and detective writer

The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.

— The Mysterious Mr. Quin

French writer, historian and philosopher

All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

— Jeannot et Colin

Indian independence activist

Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.

— The Story of My Experiments With Truth

US-British poet

The backward look behind the assurance / Of recorded history, the backward half-look / Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

— The Dry Salvages

English writer

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

— Tono-Bungay

44th President of the United States

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

— Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

English philosopher and statesman

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

— The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon

Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

— Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Irish novelist and poet

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

— Ulysses

Russian writer, publicist, poet and politician

All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.

— The First Circle

English writer and poet

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

— The Collected Works

German-born Dutch Jewish diarist and Holocaust victim

Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope!

— The Diary of a Young Girl