History Quotes

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Samuel Butler

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

H.L. Mencken

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?

Robert Penn Warren

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

Voltaire

Historians are gossips who tease the dead.

Voltaire

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

Charles Angoff

History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity.

Dexter Perkins

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

Alfred de Vigny

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Dick Gregory

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.

Voltaire

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

John Still

The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.

David Thelen