quotations about 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
Myths ... collected like barnacles on history, obscuring the truth.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
The more we know of history, the less shall we esteem the subjects of it.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
T.S. ELIOT
Gerontion
I don't believe ... that history repeats itself. There is no cycle. History is permanently doing the same thing. Sometimes we don't notice what's going on, that's all--and sometimes we have no choice but to see.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
Blood of Angels
History is a relay of revolutions.
SAUL ALINSKY
Rules for Radicals
History hath triumphed over time, which beside it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.
WALTER RALEIGH
preface, History of the World
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
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
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
There is a history in all men's lives.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Henry IV, Part II
The nature of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Theses on the Philosophy of History
History is more or less bunk.
HENRY FORD
Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916
History repeats itself.
ENGLISH PROVERB
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"
Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
ZADIE SMITH
White Teeth
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
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Longing on a large scale is what makes history.
DON DELILLO
Underworld