“A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.”
“History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.”
“From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.”
“History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.”
“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
“The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.”
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”
“The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.”
“The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.”
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
“Caesar had perished from the world of men, had not his sword been rescued by his pen.”
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
“Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.”
“History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”
“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.”
“The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.”
“A land without ruins is a land without memories -- a land without memories is a land without history.”
“To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.”
“History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.”
“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.”
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
“Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.”
“To believe what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.”
“The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.”
“What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.”
“Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.”
“To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.”
“Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.”
“An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”