The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.
The study of history, it seems to me, leads to the conviction that all important events tend toward the same end - the civilization of mankind.
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.
If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.
The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.
The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.
The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.
Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.
History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.
In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
History is not truth versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What's important is what we make of it; its moral use. By writing history, we can widen readers' thinking and deepen their sympathies in every direction. Perhaps history should show us not how to control the world, but how to enlarge, deepen, and discipline ourselves.
There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow.
History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.
It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.
You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.
Completeness is rare in history.
The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.
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