-
"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford
-
"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
-
"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying
to awake.'" James Joyce
-
"If you do not like the past, change it." William L.
Burton
-
"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.
-
"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
-
"The past is useless. That explains why it is past."
Wright Morris
-
"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
-
"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the
crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward
Gibbon
-
"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo
Emerson
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"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
-
"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past."
Sigmund Freud
-
"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich
Nietzsche
-
"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
-
"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
-
"History is the ideal laboratory for critical
thinking. By engaging the past, we can assess the roles of individuals
and of social forces in producing historical transformations, and learn
to evaluate conflicting interpretations of people and events."
Martin, Roberts, Mintz, MacMurry,
Jones