"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
— Winston S. Churchill

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

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

"i can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. it expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. "
— Virginia Woolf

"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."
— Aldous Huxley

"I am at this moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"History is written by the winners"
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference!"
— Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia)

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know."
— Harry S. Truman

"Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.
- Winston S. Churchill (on hearing the news of Pearl Harbor"
— Winston S. Churchill

"Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?"
"Why not, Papa?"
"Because they'll take you away."
"Why?"
"Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us."
"Who are Jewish people?"
"You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes?"
"Yes."
"Well, he's Jewish."
"I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license?"
.....
"...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?"
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
— H.G. Wells

"To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present."
— Golda Meir

"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters."
— African proverb

"Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
— George Macaulay Trevelyan

"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."
— Herodotus

"All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place."
— Edward W. Said

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
— Susan Sontag

"As most men are fettered by bonds of tradition and by imitating the ways followed by their fathers, ancestors, relatives, and acquaintances; everyone continues, without investigating the arguments and reasons, to follow the religion in which he was born and educated thus excluding himself from the possibility of ascertaining the truth, which is the noblest aim of the human intellect. THEREFORE, WE, associate at convenient seasons with learned men of all religions [and of no religion], thus deriving profit from their exquisite discourses and exalted aspirations."
— Akbar, 1582 (Emperor of Muhgal Empire/Inida)

"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."
— Freeman Dyson (Infinite in All Directions)

"We learn from history that we don't learn from history!"
— Desmond Tutu

""In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God...If that spirit is life, then I found life...If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three...all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.""
— Bruce Feiler

"I pin my faith to that story which is a slice out of real life."
— Lois Weber

"It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would
occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing
with the same set of facts. -Bill Vaughan, journalist (1915-1977)"
— Bill Vaughan

"History never repeats itself, historians do."
— Lee Benson (The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York As a Test Case)

"The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality."
— Charles Baudelaire

""...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused." "
— Bruce Feiler

"No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us."
— Luis Valdez (Mummified Deer And Other Plays)

"Grandmother's knee is a wonderful place to learn about the Bible, ghosts, and even Santa Claus, but a mighty poor place to learn about history."
— L.B. Taylor Jr.

"War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end."
— Stonewall Jackson

"History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity."
— David Drake (Patriots)

"Those who don't study history history are doomed to repeat it. "
— George Santayanna

"If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences."
— Albert Camus

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story."
— Herbert Butterfield (The Origins of History)

"Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again."
— Robert Coover (The Public Burning)

"To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity."
— Napoleon Bonaparte