History

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."

"Escapists take refuge in cliches such as “Human nature will never change” and “History always repeats itself!” Nevertheless, human nature is changing before our eyes, and quite new history is being made. This century has seen world war for the first time. It has seen a world civilization threatened with self-destruction, not only through war but through the exploitation of all the kingdoms in nature. It has also seen the beginnings of international alignment and collaboration. It has seen the leaders of the people struggling with great patience to work out a new political approach from the ‘world’ angle. It has seen the people themselves taking increasing individual and collective action in order to obtain a world organization or government, a universal religion, or a universal language. Let us avoid being misled by the apparent irresponsibility of the crowd with its absorption in crime films, dog racing and gambling, and its immorality and apathy!... It is traditional for the outstanding leaders of humanity to work for the shaping of history. It is a new procedure when a large and ever growing section of the public begins to take responsibility for the trend of evolution to such purpose that the community is increasingly honeycombed with progressive movements of every possible kind. This is the new element in history which constitutes a mighty landmark in the development of mankind."

"There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies. We must use our divinely-given intuition in order to arrive near to the truth. Let us begin by realizing that the story of human evolution has progressed steadily from complete exclusiveness to an ever broadening inclusiveness. At first it was built up around the self-interest of the family unit. Later the ring-pass-not enlarged to include the tribe. The tribal communities finally produced the small state or nation. The aggressive self-interest of nations eventually produced Empires. Everything outside of the Empire was potential enemy or potential prey. Finally came the conceptions of Federation and of Commonwealth. This saw the emergence of a new concept of co-operation instead of tyranny, and of the rights of the individual instead of those of the autocrat. Nevertheless, even the most benign and powerful of these nation-groups had still to consider everything outside of itself as potential enemy, and therefore self-interest still ruled."

"The past is a pointer to the future. If we can understand the past and follow the trend of development throughout history we shall be more sure of where we are going. History tells us of wars and conquests and empires and revolutions, of cities and cultures, and of religions and persecutions. Yet actually it is a rather superficial survey. It leaves out almost entirely one vital part of the picture — the most important part. It has very little to say of man’s purpose in living, of his understanding of the reason of his existence and of his conception of life around him, and his interpretation of the mysteries of creation and evolution. So little does history say about this aspect of man — the mainspring and motive of his living — that we are left guessing about the most important part of the story — the extent of man’s actual knowledge throughout the ages... We are given superficial and rather materialistic details of the outward forms and the bitter strife which accompanied the development of the various religions as they were interpreted and practised by the people, much of which leaves us with an impression of brutal and bigoted primitiveness."

"The sciences we are familiar with have been installed in a number of great 'continents'. Before Marx, two such continents had been opened up to scientific knowledge: the continent of Mathematics and the continent of Physics. The first by the Greeks (Thales), the second by Galileo. Marx opened up a third continent to scientific knowledge: the continent of History."

"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."

"History repeats itself."

"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."

"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"

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"History held counterexamples to any facile rule."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"The dignity of history."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"God cannot alter the past, historians can"

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

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

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

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

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

"History, a distillation of rumor."

"Happy the people whose annals are tiresome."

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

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

"No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics."