History

"Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying."

"History does not relate any true revolution which came from power. All began with education and meant in essence a moral summons."

"What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter."

"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."

"In the end, young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history."

"In this valley of trees and river and crystal, the fault lines of history broke."

"It is not the neutrals or the lukewarm who make history."

"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."

"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."

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."

"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."

"So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine."

"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 great Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that the first step a tyrant takes toward enslaving a people is to steal their history, for in that case, no one has anything from the past with which to compare the present, and any horror can be normalized. ... It was once said, as a commercial joke, that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The same is true in this case, but not as a joke: It’s not nice to fool with history."

"And read their history in a nation's eyes."

"Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit."

"History is at once freedom and necessity."

"History teaches, but it has no pupils."

"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."

"The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."

"[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 can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature."

"History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable."

"We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been."

"There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past."

"“It can’t make things any worse.” “If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend."

"History does not belong to us, we belong to it."

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

""[T]his historian who seeks to mine the various quarries of the past in the belief that good history is a good foundation for a better present and future.”"

"Today is Yesterday's Pupil."

"I disbelieve in both cycles of history and ends of history. History is the interaction of many complex systems. There are certain long-run processes (notably exponential gains in productivity through the development of technology and the “suprasecular” decline of nominal and real interest rates as a result of capital accumulation) punctuated by, well, one disaster after another. These disasters are either randomly distributed or follow a power law (i.e. there are lots of little earthquakes, pandemics or wars, but a few cataclysmic ones). At unpredictable intervals, the global system is tipped into a major transition by a disturbance that can be quite small, if not quite as small as Edward Lorenz’s famous butterfly in the Amazon setting off a tornado in Texas. Russia’s war in Ukraine — destructive certainly, but still a relatively small conflict by 20th-century standards — can be enough to trigger a “conflict avalanche.”"

"A defining feature of history is that there are many more black swans — not to mention what Didier Sornette calls “dragon kings,” events so large in scale that they lie beyond even a power-law distribution — than a normally distributed world would lead us to expect. All such events lie in the realm of uncertainty, not of calculable risk. Moreover, the world we have built has, over time, become an increasingly complex system prone to all kinds of random behavior, nonlinear relationships and “fat-tailed” distributions. A disaster such as a pandemic is not a single, discrete event. It invariably leads to other forms of disaster — economic, social and political. There can be, and often are, cascades or chain reactions of disaster. The more networked the world becomes, the more we see this."

"Economic history is not politically correct. Many on the left therefore struggle with its findings."

"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction."

"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

"History is a pageant, not a philosophy."

"Happy is the nation without a history."

"If you don't know history, it's as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday, then any leader can tell you anything."

"The greater part of what passes for diplomatic history is little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk."

"It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors."

"Those old credulities, to nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of History."

"We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations [i.e. the East]. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has [an autonomous] genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... [This is] misleading, first, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in which each [Western] runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous [i.e. the West] win out over the bad guys [the East]."

"History does not warehouse well in neatly labeled boxes, for events do not exist in quarantined isolation. They exist on a broad spectrum, and all influence and shape each other. Historical episodes are rarely built on the ground of a single foundation. Most are the product of a tangled web of influences and cascading cause-and-effect relationships within a broader historical narrative."

"Memory plays tricks that history corrects."

"History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. it is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."