quotations about history
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs -- the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
The Legacy of the Civil War
Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.
RICHARD NIXON
Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1969
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
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.
CARL SAGAN
The Demon-Haunted World
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Prelude to Foundation
He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.
CHRIS ABANI
The Secret History of Las Vegas
The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
There is a history in all men's lives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry IV, Part II
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
History is a relay of revolutions.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
T.S. ELIOT
Gerontion
History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.
MALCOLM X
Message to the Grass Roots, Nov. 10, 1963
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
DON DELILLO
Underworld
People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Eragon
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
TRACY K. SMITH
"Sci-Fi"