History Quotes

Woe unto the defeated,
whom history treads
into the dust.

Arthur Koestler

Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.

Franklin P. Jones

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Michel de Montaigne

Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes.

Jean Jaures

History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army.

Allan Nevins

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

African Proverb

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

John Leonard

Men have need of history because, without it, the past threatens to overwhelm them.

Guy Fregault

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Jean Genet

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

Romain Gary

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

Walter Rauschenbusch

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

Richard Ellman

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.

Paul Eldridge

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Conor Cruise O'Brien