Sourced and curated.

If history records good things of good men, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good.

Venerable Bede

731

★ 1.2

Interview · Magazine

It would be nice to forget history, but we do it at our peril.

Lucille Clifton

2007

★ 1.2

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest.

Thucydides

History of the Peloponnesian War · 404 BC

★ 1.3

So poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history, for while poetry is concerned with universal truth, history treats of particular facts.

Aristotle

Poetics · 335 BC

★ 1.3

Nothing changes more constantly that the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but what men believe happened.

Gerald White Johnson

1943

★ 1.7

Human blunders, however, usually, do more to shape history than human wickedness.

A.J.P. Taylor

The Origins of the Second World War · 1961

★ 1.8

Magazine

You can't get at the truth by writing history; only the novelist can do that.

Gerald Brenan

1986

★ 1.8

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Julian Barnes

1989

★ 1.8

Political literature · Philosophical literature

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Popper

1945

★ 1.9

TV program

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love... If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.

Carl Sagan

Cosmos · 1980

★ 1.9

Essay · Economic literature

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

John Maynard Keynes

1926

★ 1.9

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity.

Cicero

On Oratory · 55 BC

★ 2.0

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

Edward Gibbon

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire · 1776

★ 2.0

Essay · Historical literature

History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.

Thomas Carlyle

1830

★ 2.0

History is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.

Karl Marx

The Holy Family · 1845

★ 2.0

Essay

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Oscar Wilde

Intentions · 1891

★ 2.1

Novel · Modernist literature

History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Ulysses · 1922

★ 2.1

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

1767

★ 2.9

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave.

H.A.L. Fisher

1935

★ 3.4

Essay

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

William Ralph Inge

1948

★ 3.4

Speech

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

1970

★ 3.5

Lecture · Philosophical literature

What experience and history teach is this-that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1830

★ 3.6

Essay

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

W.H. Auden

1962

★ 3.6

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending · 2011

★ 3.6

Political literature

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France · 1790

★ 3.7

Political literature

History is a relay of revolutions.

Saul Alinsky

Rules for Radicals · 1971

★ 3.7

Interview · Biography

The history of things that didn’t happen has never been written.

Henry Kissinger

1972

★ 3.7

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child.

Cicero

46 BC

★ 3.8

Speech · Military speech

Think of it, soldiers; from the summit of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.

Napoleon Bonaparte

1823

★ 3.8

Letter

What I did that was new was to prove... That the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Karl Marx

1852

★ 3.8

Short story · Magazine

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.

George Eliot

1857

★ 3.8

Political literature

At every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America · 1840

★ 3.9

In historical events great men-so called-are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself.

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace · 1869

★ 3.9

Comedy special · Comedy (stand up)

John F. Kennedy. Remember him? He fucked Marilyn Monroe. Matter of fact, him and his brother Bobby fucked Marilyn Monroe. And history doesn’t talk about that much. You know why history doesn’t talk about that much? Because those two pages in history are stuck together.

Dave Chappelle

Killin' Them Softly · 2000

★ 4.5

Essay · Magazine

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

1956

★ 5.2

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Thomas Carlyle

On Heroes · 1840

★ 5.4

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Willa Cather

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 5.5