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History is an account, mostly false, of
events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly
knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
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-Ambrose Bierce
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*[V]ery few scholars can
boast that they are equally well equipped to read critically a medieval
charter, to explain correctly the etymology of place-names, to date
unerringly the ruins of dwellings of the prehistoric, Celtic, or Gallo-Roman
periods, and to analyze the plant life proper to a pasture, a field, or a
moor. Without all these, however, how could one pretend to describe the
history of land use? Few sciences, I believe, are forced to use so many
dissimilar tools at the same time.
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-Marc Bloch
Historical Analysis, 1942
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History is the biography
of great men.
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-Thomas Carlyle
(cf. HISTORY : Emerson)
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History is something sacred because it is true.
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-Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
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The first law for the historian is that he
shall never dare to utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress
nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality
in his writing, or of malice.
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-Marcus Tullius Cicero
Pro Publio Sestio
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Study the past if you would divine the future.
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-Confucius
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*Recognizing what we have
done in the past is recognizing ourselves.
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-P.J. Conover
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Civilization is a stream with banks. The
stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting
and doing things the historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed,
people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and
even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the
banks.
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-Will and Ariel Durant
The History of Civilization
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There is properly no history, only
biography.
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-Ralph Waldo Emerson
(cf. HISTORY : Carlyle)
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History continues for all of us. The Civil
War is not over. Those [soldiers in the movie "Gettysburg"] who were wearing
blue would not wear gray, and those men that were wearing grey did not want
to wear blue...History continues and is still alive.
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-Moctesuma Esparza
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~Small countries tend to
remember history especially well, since it often turns out badly for
them.
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-Marc Falcoff
The New Republic, July 3, 1989
"Semper Fidel"
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~The study of history is a
powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover
how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have
been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and
discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
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-Paul Johnson
The Quotable Paul Johnson: A Topical
Compilation of His Wit, Wisdom and Satire, 1994
George J. Marlin, et al., eds.
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*It is all too easy for us
today to as we stand upon the shoulders of those who went before us to
criticize them for being unaware of what now appears self-evident to us.
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-Carter Lindberg
The European Reformations, 1996
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*Other peoples use writing
to record the past, but this invention has killed the faculty of memory
among them. They do not feel the past any more, for writing lacks the
warmth of the human voice. The prophets did not write and their words have
been all the more vivid as a result. What paltry learning is that which is
congealed in dumb books!
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-Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté, as told to D.T. Niane
Sundiata : An Epic of Old Mali, 1960
"History"
G.D. Pickett, trans., 1965
(cf. BOOKS : Sagan)
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Very little is known about the War of 1812
because the Americans lost it.
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-Eric Nicol
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*Literature is the immortal
part of history.
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-William Lyon Phelps
Radio broadcast, April 6, 1933
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One's memory may almost become the art of
continually varying and misrepresenting one's past, according to one's
interest in the present.
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-George Santayana
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~[W]hat's past is prologue.
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-Antonio, a character in William Shakespeare's
The Tempest, 1612
Act 2, scene i
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*The stream of history flows
steadily towards the sea of infinity.
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-Lewis W. Spitz
The Renaissance and Reformation Movements,
Revised Edition, Vol. I: The Renaissance, 1971
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We are tomorrow's past.
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-Mary Webb
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