History Quotes - Page 28

• History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Body, Politics

  Thomas Jefferson (1774). “A summary view of the rights of British America: Set forth in some resolutions intended for the inspection of the present delegates of the people of Virginia, now in convention ...”, p.7

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• For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

  Gloria Steinem

  Girl, Gossip, Listening

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• We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.

  Samuel Johnson

  Kings, Philosophy, Real

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, p.526

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• The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

  Agatha Christie

  Writing, Generations, Historian

  Agatha Christie (2010). “The Mysterious Mr Quin”, p.22, HarperCollins UK

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• History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Ideas, Dying

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• History is an agreed-upon fiction.

  Diane Ackerman

  Fiction

  Diane Ackerman (2011). “A Natural History of Love: Author of the National Bestseller A Natural History of the Senses”, p.7, Vintage

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• If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

  Jane Austen

  Girl, Education, Book

  Jane Austen (2009). “Jane Austen: The Works in Eight Volumes”, Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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• History is not written in the interests of morality.

  Agnes Repplier

  Morality, Interest, Written

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• The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

  Agnes Repplier

  Thinking, Study, Hopefully

  Agnes Repplier (1924). “Under dispute”

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• Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

  Simone Weil

  Believe, Matter, Murderer

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• The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.

  Barbara Holland

  Doe, Remember, Trouble

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• 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.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Country, Past, Different

  Elizabeth Janeway (1987). “Improper behavior”, William Morrow

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• If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

  Elizabeth Janeway

  Writing, Government, Views

  Elizabeth Janeway (1974). “Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening”, New York : Morrow, 1974, 1975 printing.

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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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• if we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.

  Hannah Arendt

  Fate, Doomed, Knows

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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 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 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.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Dream, Writing, Thinking

  Gretel Ehrlich (1989). “Heart Mountain”, Vintage

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• History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Essence, Mind, Dull

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• 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.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Denial, Culture, Forget

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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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