History is philosophy teaching by example.
~ Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in De Arte Rhetorica

History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning.
~ Lord Bolingbroke

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
~ Lord Bolingbroke

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
~ Lord Acton

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
~ Henry Adams

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
~ Maya Angelou

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
~ Aristotle

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…. I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.
~ Spoken by Jane Austen’s character Catherine Morland, in “Northanger Abbey”)

Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.
~ Geoffrey Barraclough

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
~ Roy P. Basler

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
~ Max Beerbohm

That generations of historians have resorted to what might be called “proof by haphazard quotation” does not make the procedure valid or reliable; it only makes it traditional.
~ Lee Benson

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.
~ Peter Berger

History: an account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
~ Ambrose Bierce

History is, in its essentials, the science of change.
~ Marc Bloch

The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served.
~ Borne

History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
~ Randolph S. Bourne

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
~ Norman O. Brown

History is still in large measure poetry to me.
~ Jakob Burckhardt

History is a science, no more and no less.
~ J. B. Bury

History, the evidence of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity, committed to immortality.
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Oratore

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.
~ Cicero

All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.
~ Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time; the articulate, audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History, a distillation of rumour.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
~ Thomas Carlyle

[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History is a great dust heap.
~ Thomas Carlyle

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
~ Winston Churchill

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
~ R. G. Collingwood

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it — as with these — life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.
~ Henry Steele Commager

History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
~ Fustel de Coulanges

A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him.
~ Malcolm Cowley

History is the name we human beings give to the horizon of consciousness within which we live.
~ Harvey Cox

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
~ E. L. Doctorow

History is the self-consciousness of humanity.
~ Droyson

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
~ Will Durant

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
~ Abba Eban

What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.
~ Jacques Ellul

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
~ Henry Ford

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge — myth is more potent than history — dreams are more powerful than facts — hope always triumphs over experience — laughter is the cure for grief — love is stronger than death.
~ Robert Fulghum

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author’s personality.
~ Pieter Geyl

[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
~ Edward Gibbon

The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.
~ Edward Gibbon

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
~ Etienne Gilson

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
~ Goethe

Patriotism ruins history.
~ Goethe

History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history.
~ Louis Gottschalk

Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
~ David Ben Gurion

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.
~ Jane Haddam

History is ultimately more important than its singers.
~ Michael Harrington

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Writing intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
~ William Hesseltine

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
~ Oliver W. Holmes, Jr.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.
~ I Ching

History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.
~ James Joyce

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
~ Robert F. Kennedy

The past does not influence me; I influence it.
~ Willem De Kooning

What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are ‘the lessons of history’? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
~ Gerda Lerner

We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.
~ Gerda Lerner

History is not history unless it is truth.
~ Abraham Lincoln

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
~ Machiavelli

Very deep, very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
~ Thomas Mann

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
~ Karl Marx

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
~ Karl Marx

History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
~ Karl Marx

When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
~ Shailer Mathews

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.
~ David C. McCullough

I love to tell a story. History, I believe, is best understood as an unfolding story.
~ David C. McCullough

No harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
~ David C. McCullough

I don’t believe the truth will ever be known, and I have a great contempt for history.
~ General George Meade

History is a myth that men agree to believe.
~ Napoleon

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.
~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Man in a word has no nature; what he has… is history.
~Jose Ortega y Gasset

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
~ Karl Popper

In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.
~ Leopold von Ranke

All history is incomprehensible without Christ.
~ Ernest Renan

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.
~ James Harvey Robinson

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
~ A. L. Rowse

I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
~ Vita Sackville-West

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana, in The Life of Reason

History is alway written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
~ George Santayana, in The Life of Reason

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
~ George Santayana

The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.
~ Friedrich Von Schiller

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
~ Schopenhauer

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
~ Sir Walter Scott

History without politics descends to mere Literature.
~ Sir John Robert Seely

History is not a science; it is a method.
~ Charles Seignobos

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
~ George Bernard Shaw

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
~ George Bernard Shaw

With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
~ Kenneth Stampp

Myth, memory, history-these are three alternative ways to capture and account for an elusive past, each with its own persuasive claim.
~ Warren I. Susman

This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
~ Tacitus

“History” is a Greek word which means, literally, just “investigation.”
~ Arnold Toynbee

We’re falling out of the world of history into the world of demographics where we count everything and value nothing.
~ George W. S. Trow

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
~ Mark Twain

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
~ Mark Twain

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
~ Mark Twain

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past – can’t be restored.
~ Mark Twain

History is the science of what never happens twice.
~ Paul Valery

History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
~ Voltaire

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
~ Voltaire

[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.
~ Voltaire

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

The researches of many eminent antiquarians have already thrown much darkness on the subject; and it is possible, if they continue their labors, that we shall soon know nothing at all.
~ Artemus Ward

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
~ Robert Penn Warren

The past is always a rebuke to the present.
~ Robert Penn Warren

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
~ Robert Penn Warren

History is a bag of tricks which the dead have played upon historians.
~ Lynn White, Jr.

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
~ Oscar Wilde

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And a few recommended books on History / Historiography:

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