History Quotes

"History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction." "A writer's job is to give testimony, to bear witness to an age and the legacies of those who inhabit it." "History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets" "To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days." "History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice." "There is nothing new but what has once been old" "Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago " "Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it" "It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having a dinner conversation with you." "The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: too late" "The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes" "The one charm of the past is that it is the past" "The best way to predict the future is to study the past, or prognosticate." "History is the result of a cognitive revolution, not just progression" "In the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague, and war"