Quotes About History

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

In 1812 the U.S. Army consisted of fewer than seven thousand regular troops.

the country's designation remained "the United States of America," with its people appropriating the name that belonged to all the peoples of the New World—even though the term "Americans" actually had begun as a pejorative label the metropolitan English had applied to their inferior and far-removed colonists.101

Old men are like the wrecks of time, thrown by the waves of one century upon the shores of another.

I turned off my tape-recorder and just sat looking at him for a moment, this strange time-traveller from the year 1890 or so, who remembered when there were no cars, no electric lights, no airplanes, no state of Arizona.

Europe has nothing to recommend it but its old age, and the Petrified forest in Arizona makes a Sucker out of it for old age. Why, that forest was there and doing business before Nero took his first Violin lesson.

A precious – mouldering pleasure – 'tis – To meet an Antique Book – In just the Dress his Century wore – A privilege – I think – His venerable Hand to take – And warming in our own – A passage back – or two – to make – To Times when he – was young... His presence is enchantment – You beg him not to go – Old Volumes shake their Vellum Heads And tantalize – just so –

Old books are leather-bound ghosts.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.

That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.

The ancient Mexicans used to spend all the day and half the night in dancing with only cacao for nourishment.

The reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.

I think a civilization is created out of some kind of sublimation of violence. When the violence gets too sublimated, you get a sick civilization.

The convention of one age is the laughing-stock of the next.

Ruth Graves Wakefield, inventor of the chocolate chip cookie — and the greatest hero in American history!

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves...? We live by exaggeration. What else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy? The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

History ain't what it is. It's what some writer wanted it to be.

The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.

History is a riddle, to be solved by inference... We see the puppets dance, but the springs which move them are invisible, and must be conjectured.

History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it.

The road through Irish history is made up of lanes which wind about, and never come to an end till they twist into pathways which never begin.

History is the shadow of time; life its substance, and they bear the same relation to one another, that the dim twilight does to the up-risen and visible sun. It is in vain to talk to men of throwing their minds into the past, or into the future, you may as well bid them leap out of themselves, or beyond their shadow. The present is all in all to us.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

But history supplies little beyond a list of those who have accomodated themselves with the property of others.