Quotes · Skopia

45 quotes

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting · 1979

★ 1.0

Historical literature

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

Historical literature

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

Philosophical literature

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

Historical literature

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

Historical literature

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

Philosophical literature

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

Historical literature

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

Philosophical literature

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

Historical literature

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

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