Quotes · Skopia

15 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Nature of history✕clear

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.

The Origins of the Second World War · 1961

★ 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.

1945

★ 1.9

Historical literature

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

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

★ 2.0

Essay · Historical literature

History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.

1830

★ 2.0

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian-ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey

Eminent Victorians · 1918

★ 2.5

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.

1935

★ 3.4

Historical literature

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Samuel Eliot Morison

1965

★ 3.4

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.

Alfred Tennyson

Poems · 1842

★ 3.6

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

1852

★ 3.8

Short story · Magazine

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.

1857

★ 3.8

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.

War and Peace · 1869

★ 3.9

Film · Film noir · Drama (film) · Drama

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The Third Man · 1949

★ 4.4

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

O Pioneers! · 1913

★ 5.5

Philosophical literature · Historical literature

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophy of History · 1832

★ 6.3