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"History is more or less
bunk." Henry Ford
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"History is the witness
that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality,
vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us
tidings of antiquity." Cicero
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"'History,' Stephen said,
'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce
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"If you do not like the
past, change it." William L. Burton
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"Since history has no
properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if
historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it
intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is
valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M.
Trevelyan.
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"To each eye, perhaps, the
outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the
wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are
many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily,
in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and
application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob
Burckhardt
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"The past is useless. That
explains why it is past." Wright Morris
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"Faithfulness to the truth
of history involves far more than a research, however patient and
scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the
most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be
unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the
life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings
near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who
took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a
spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman
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"History . . . is indeed
little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes
of mankind." Edward Gibbon
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"There is properly no
history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The study of history is
the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of
the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to
see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both
examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things
rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy
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"What experience and
history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned
anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." G.
W. F. Hegel
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"Everything must be
recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that
despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and
contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the
unity of life." Fernand Braudel
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"The function off the
historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from
the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the
understanding of the present." E. H. Carr
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"History does nothing,
possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the
real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History,
as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her
purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men
pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx
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"An historian should yield
himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his
choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel
Eliot Morison
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"History is for
human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it
is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of
person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you
are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can
do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only
clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history,
then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man
is." R. G. Collingwood
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"That historians should
give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state
things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by
writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to
avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake
of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference
is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive
to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly
on their guard." Polybius
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"You have reckoned that
history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world
as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high
office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von
Ranke
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"Time in its irresistible
and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and
drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history
forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in
some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it,
as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and
does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna
Comnena
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"Only a good-for-nothing
is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud
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"Every past is worth
condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche
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"The historian does simply
not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges
even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim
Yerushalmi
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"Each age tries to form
its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the
past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own
time." Frederick Jackson Turner
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"History is an effort to
reconstruct the past to discover what people thought and did and how
their beliefs and actions continue to influence human life." McKay,
Hill, Buckler, Ebrey