History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; priviledging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. – Thomas Fuller

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology. – Leopold von Ranke

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.  Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? – Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

And read their history in a nation’s eyes. – Thomas Gray

Happy is the nation without a history. – Cesare di Bonesana Beccaria

History never looks like history when you are living through it. – John W. Gardner

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits.  That is history to me! – George Macaulay Trevelyan

To many of the modern generations, history, like God, is dead. – Derek Heather

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom. – Leonard Louis Levinson

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history. – Johan Huizinga, Men and Ideas

Radical historians now the tell the story of Thanksgiving from the point of view of the turkey. – Mason Cooley

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. – Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together. – Theodore White

Without philosophy, history seems to me to be deaf and dumb. – Ferdinand Baur, Symbolik und Mythologic

History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force. – Frederick Maurice Powicke

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors. – Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations

[History is a] mixture of error and violence. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People tend to forget that the word “history” contains the word “story”. – Ken Burns

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history. – Carlton J.H. Hayes

History is merely gossip. – Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan

History is not the past, but a map of the past drawn from a particular point of view to be useful to the modern traveler. – Henry Glassie

History is philosophy teaching by examples. – Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. – Edward Gibbon

Give the historians something to write about. – Propertius

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history. – Anon.

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common. – Mark M. Krug, History and the Social Sciences

History does not unfold:  it piles up. – Robert M. Adams, Bad Mouth

Historians are themselves products of history. – Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, Heritage and Challenge

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people’s brains but in their nerves and vitals. – Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead