Sociology

"The historian and the facts of history are necessary to one another. The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past."

"Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books."

"All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once."

"All history … is an inarticulate Bible."

"History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought."

"History is the essence of innumerable Biographies."

"Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul."

"No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men."

"Happy the people whose annals are tiresome."

"History, a distillation of rumor."

"History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club."

"And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page."

"What want these outlaws conquerors should have But History's purchased page to call them great?"

"History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another."

"What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history — and you certainly see that in financial markets all the time."

"God cannot alter the past, historians can"

"History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it."

"History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy."

"Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view."

"Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain."

"On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends, “In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin.” Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of the governments has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity."

"History is not to serve as the handmaid of a particular school of thought. History must be impartial and objective. To rewrite the history, according to the views which are popular or which are necessary for bolstering up nationalistic egoism or jingoism is perversion of history."

"The dignity of history."

"I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples."

"With all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to the present regime."

"The essence of studying history is that, as best we can, we try to wear the shoes and put on the spectacles worn by people of the past. We try to see the obstacles and dilemmas they struggled against or evaded. We also hope that the future will try to understand why we made blunders, and learn from failures and achievements of our era."

"Unpredictable events, or the coincidence of vital events happening side by side, play their part in history. In the emerging of the United States of America, the South American nations, South Africa, Canada and Australia the unforeseen mixture of events was especially powerful in the final decades of the 18th century."

"If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future."

"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

"History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side."

"Mrs. Lintott: Now. How do you define history, Mr. Rudge? Rudge: Can I speak freely, Miss? Without being hit? Mrs. Lintott: I will protect you. Rudge: How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another."

"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."

"Take one of Voltaire's swift shining shafts of wit: "History is after all only a pack of tricks we play on the dead." Ah, yes, how true it is, we say; and we are astonished that Voltaire could have been so profound. Then we realize that he did not really mean it. To him it was a witticism intended to brand dishonest historians, whereas we perceive that it formulated, in the neatest possible way, a profound truth — the truth that all historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind."

"“Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”"

"The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin."

"The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation. Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution—today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references. It is into this void that the phantasms of a past history recede, the panoply of events, ideologies, retro fashions—no longer so much because people believe in them or still place some hope in them, but simply to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence (albeit fascist), when at least life and death were at stake."

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history."

"History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle."

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian."

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"Ghosts of my history will follow me there/And the winds of the old days will blow through my hair"

"Our prevailing notions of history are exceedingly narrow and exceedingly selective. And basically the process of selection is one that aims to reassure ourselves that the myths that we believe in can be sustained. ... Recognize the truths, the realities that I want to and ignore the ones that I find inconvenient."

"All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle."

"Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction."

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

"Historical reality is then a 'referential illusion', in which we try to grasp the reality (the referent of language) that we believe lies beyond the barrier of the linguistic construction of its narratives. In this way history becomes a Myth or an ideology as it purports to be reality. Indeed, storytelling is often seen as one of the most important functions of writing histories and fundamental to the nature of the discipline."

"The recognition of the role and importance of subjectivity in the construction of histories does, by implication, negate the possibility for objectivity in the writing of history. But there will always be historical narrative and, consequently, a narrative voice, be it hidden in the syntactical structure of the writing by, for instance, the absence of first person or the use of simple past tense. But this is a sleight of hand which gives the reader a sense of immediate contact with the past without the presence of an interlocutor. This apparently ‘unmediated’ contact gives history a kind of privileged status of objective knowledge"

"History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself."

"History repeats itself."

"I was not speaking of minor ripples in the mainstream of history—certainly those are ruled by chance. But the broad current moves quite inexorably, I assure you."