History Quotes And Sayings

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn -- Huck, referring to the Widow Douglas, Chapter 1.

A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents. ~Richard Reeves

Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be. ~P.J. O'Rourke

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me! ~George Macaulay Trevelyan

If you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree. ~Michael Crichton, Timeline

The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history? ~Katharine Anthony

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations. ~John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Table - Talk
Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. ~Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman. ~George Santayana, The Life of Reason

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes. ~Paul Eldridge, Maxims for a Modern Man

History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. ~Thomas Fuller

All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks between one and another that were trodden by the weary generations of men. ~John Alfred Spender, The Comments of Bagshot

Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes. ~Jean Jaures

Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.
~Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon