History Quotes

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Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again.
Doris Lessing

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
Samuel Butler

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Leo Tolstoy

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire

History is the science of what never happens twice.
Paul Valéry

History is written by the victors.
Winston Churchill

Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the young, and by educators, too. Yet from them one may learn how to be a citizen and a human being. We may learn how to look at ourselves and at the society we live in, in that calm, cool, critical and sceptical way which is the only possible stance for a civilized human being, or so have said all the philosophers and the sages.
Doris Lessing

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

The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.
Robert Heinlein /Expanded Universe/

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.
Winston Churchill

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
George Washington

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Jessamyn West

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana