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What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, as we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist.
History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story.
BUZZ ALDRIN, Esquire, Jan. 2003
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
KARL MARX, Die Heilige Familie
History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
HOWARD ZINN, Rawstory.com interview, Sep. 9, 2005
Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.
V. S. NAIPAUL, The Enigma of Arrival
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
KARL MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
ISAAC ASIMOV, Prelude to Foundation
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