History Quotes - Page 20

• The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

  Susan Sontag

  Fiction, Crowds, Obliged

  Susan Sontag (2007). “At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches”, p.92, Macmillan

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• 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.

  Freya Stark

  Past, Journey, Treasure

  Freya Stark (2011). “The Lycian Shore”, p.32, Tauris Parke Paperbacks

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• 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.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Book, Long, Mind

  Elizabeth Hardwick (1962). “A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society”

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• History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Art, Taken, Salt

  Phyllis McGinley, Gerald Durrell (1969). “Birds, beasts, and relatives”, Viking Adult

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• There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Lost, Buried

  Muriel Rukeyser (2013). “Savage Coast”, p.9, The Feminist Press at CUNY

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• In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.

  Louise Bernikow

  Mother, Past, Trying

  Louise Bernikow (1981). “Among women”, HarperCollins

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• Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Cutting, Age

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.1, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• Every generation tailors history to its taste.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Generations, Tailors, Taste

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

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• History is clarified experience.

  James Russell Lowell

  James Russell Lowell (1910). “Literary and political addresses”

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• Completeness is rare in history.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Completeness

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, p.116, Random House

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• The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

  Barbara Tuchman

  People, Poetry, Historian

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• History, the winnowing wind, never halts. We see the chaff rise, forget the waiting grain, seed of the future, fallen to the threshing floor. We never learn, but live on, slit-narrow, as if our living were a pencil line traced upon paper, behaving as trapped denizens of a flat world hemmed in by the bigoted horizon of our own making. Yet the meaning of living is a pushing back, a pulling down of the great walls and domes of fear and ignorance, is relinquishing the nest for the sky, ignorance for understanding. The look back is also a look forward.

  Han Suyin

  Wall, Ignorance, Past

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• A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Doe, Historian, Nations

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• somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  School, Moral, Century

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

  Fernand Braudel

  Ifs

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• History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.

  Penelope Lively

  Natural, Circumstances, Following

  Penelope Lively (2007). “Moon Tiger”, p.11, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• The lessons of the past suggest that racism and resentment against people of color will continue to flourish in America as long as the history that is taught transposes the heroes and the villains. That is the unspoken truth at the heart of the nation's racial divide.

  Susan L. Taylor

  Hero, Heart, Past

  Susan L. Taylor (2010). “Lessons in Living”, p.159, Anchor

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• Despite the modern dogma to the effect that women were a subject sex until the nineteenth century 'emancipated' them from history, women in history had demonstrated strong wills and purposes, had made assertions, and had directed or influenced all human destiny, including their own, since human life began.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Strong, Sex, Women

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• Most American heroes of the Revolutionary period are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image. Some are even three men - the actual man, the image, and the debunked remains.

  Esther Forbes

  Hero, Men, Two

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• It's really hard for me to use the term 'history' in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I'd rather stick to the pluralness of 'histories' in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.

  Barbara Kruger

  Views, Order, Events

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• History is a great painter, with the world for canvas, and life for a figure. It exhibits man in his pride, and nature in her magnificence,--Jerusalem bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of great affairs.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Pride, Men, Flames

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• History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,--the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Drama, Moving, Epic

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• It is the winners who write history - their way.

  Elaine Pagels

  Writing, Way, Winner

  Elaine Pagels (2004). “The Gnostic Gospels”, p.190, Random House

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• Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.

  Adrienne Mayor

  War, Ideas, Years

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