History Quotes

"The role of the storyteller is to regenerate the past so that it might deliver its message for the present moment" "Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater" "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" "Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably" "To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves." "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" "We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here" "World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are the blank pages of history." "The biggest difference between England and America is that England has history, while America has geography" "History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction." "A writer's job is to give testimony, to bear witness to an age and the legacies of those who inhabit it." "History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets" "To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days." "History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice." "There is nothing new but what has once been old" "Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago " "Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it" "It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having a dinner conversation with you." "The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: too late"