Time

"Let us all remember: history makes us and we the people make history"

"[I]t is the historian's task to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Furthermore his task is a very different one from that of the novelist. Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omniscience which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most secret places of their hearts."

"History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveller."

"History teaches, but it has no pupils."

"The problem of locating photos often confirms the indifference to women’s presence in history, as reflected in the media, books, historical records, museums, university libraries."

"History is a great teacher which can help us create a better world. But unfortunately the lessons of history are often ignored, sometimes deliberately. And because we ignore the lessons of history we keep on repeating the mistakes of the past and we suffer accordingly. This is what George Santayana meant when he said that if we ignore the lessons of history then we would be condemned to repeat our mistakes. The world of today gives the feeling of "deja vu", of having seen all these things before. Nothing new is really happening because we continue to commit the same mistakes, the same crimes and the same sins."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"History, if it should serve its purpose of stirring emotion, instigating inquiry and directing thought, must first of all be exciting. Is it impossible to be both truthful and warm-hearted, both factual and moving? Are imagination and conscience necessarily enemies to each other? In reconciling them is the art of the true historian. The flow of the story must be swift, vivid, vibrant."

"The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit."

"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."

"There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."

"The expansion of Europe was the transforming force in human history of the last 500 years, and yet the modern academy looks for reasons not to study it. In the era of decolonisation the new nations want to stress their indigenous roots and sympathetic scholars explain that European influence was not overwhelming, but that it was used and subverted by locals for local purposes. To concentrate on Europe is criticised as 'Eurocentric'. But to ignore Europe makes the history of any part of the globe unintelligible."

"I claim for students of history that their study – if properly conducted – can strip the mind of illusions, leading them from heady abstraction back to men and women in their infinite diversity – warning them, by reference to actuality, against this or that ideology which oversimplifies the past under a single formula or promises the millenium the day after tomorrow."

"History has always changed its course, changed its stance, swaying to the tunes, pendulum like, between a Ruling Party and an Opposition Party."

"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."

"Most historical facts are unpleasant."

"I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."

"History is just as much a science as chemistry or physics. It has its own laws, it has its own logic."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"While law responds to historical change, it also makes history. Law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over whom law seeks to exercise its dominion. Law constructs a that it wants to present as authoritative, when, as Laura Kalman argues, no historian “considers the past authoritative.” And law uses history to tell us who we are."

"The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations."

"I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren't realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved."

"Dabit deus his quoque finem."

"Oogway: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the "present"."

"Quid crastina volveret ætas, Scire nefas homini."

"God, if Thy will be so, Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace, With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!"

"Could we but know The land that ends our dark, uncertain travel."

"Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius."

"How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents yet unknown."

"When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards ride no more."

"And better skilled in dark events to come."

"In adamantine chains shall Death be bound, And Hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound."

"Etwas fürchten und hoffen und sorgen, Muss der Mensch für den kommenden Morgen."

"Après nous le déluge."

"Oh, blindness to the future! kindly giv'n, That each may fill the circle mark'd by heaven."

"But there's a gude time coming."

"When I am dead let the earth be dissolved in fire."

"There was the Door to which I found no key; There was the Veil through which I might not see."

"The never-ending flight Of future days."

"Venator sequitur fugientia; capta relinquit; Semper et inventis ulteriora petit."

"Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

"The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most."

"The wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it."

"Ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus, Et certam præsens vix habet hora fidem."

"Le présent est gros de l'avenir."

"When Earth's last picture is painted, and the tubes are twisted and dried, When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died, We shall rest, and faith, we shall need it—lie down for an æon or two, Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall set us to work anew."

"Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant! Let the dead Past bury its dead!"

"There's a good time coming, boys; A good time coming: We may not live to see the day, But earth shall glisten in the ray Of the good time coming. Cannon-balls may aid the truth, But thought's a weapon stronger; We'll win our battle by its aid, Wait a little longer."

"With whom there is no place of toil, no burning heat, no piercing cold, nor any briars there … this place we call the Bosom of Abraham."