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Happy is the nation without a history.
Author: Cesare di Bonesana Beccaria
Source: Trattato dei Delitti e delle Pene (introduction), (Treatise of Crimes and of Punishment)
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History is a pageant, not a philosophy.
Author: Augustine Birrell
Source: Obiter Dicta--The Muse of History
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I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I
think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
Author: Henry St. John Bolingbroke
Source: On the Study and Use of History (letter 2)
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The dignity of history.
Author: Henry St. John Bolingbroke
Source: On the Study and Use of History (letter V)
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What want these outlaws conquerors should have
But History's purchased page to call them great?
Author: Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)
Source: Childe Harold (canto III, st. 48)
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And history with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page.
Author: Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron)
Source: Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 108)
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All history is a Bible--a thing stated in words by me more than
once.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: quoted in Froude's "Early Life of Carlyle"
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Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted
with an eye and a soul.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Cromwell's Letter and Speeches--Introduction (ch. I)
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History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Essays--On History
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History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first
distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest
expression of what can be called Thought.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Essays--On History
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In a certain sense all men are historians.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Essays--On History
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History, a distillation of rumor.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: French Revolution (pt. I, bk. VII, ch. V)
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All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Latter Day Pamphlets (405)
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Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: Life of Frederick the Great (bk. XVI, ch. I)
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What more would you have? He has invented history.
[Fr., Que voulez-vous de plus? Il a invente l'histoire.]
Author: Madame Marie Anne du Deffand
Source: said of Voltaire, who was accused by critics of lack of invention
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The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides
appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from
examples.
Author: Dionysius of Heraclea
Source: Ars Rhetorica (XI, 2, p. 212), (Tauchnitz edition)
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Assassinations has never changed the history of the world.
Author: Benjamin Disraeli
Source: Speech
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History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they
have exhausted all other alternatives.
Author: Abba Eban
Source: in a speech in London
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A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a
thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul,
Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source: Essays--History
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There is properly no history, only biography.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source: Essays--History
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History is more or less bunk.
Author: Henry Ford
Source: in the "Chicago Tribune"
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The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of
furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little
more than the register of the crimes, and misfortunes of mankind.
Author: Edward Gibbon
Source: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ch. III), (1776)
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And read their history in a nation's eyes.
Author: Thomas Gray
Source: Elegy in a Country Churchyard (st. 16)
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The long historian of my country's woes.
Author: Homer ("Smyrns of Chios")
Source: The Odyssey (bk. III, l. 142), (Pope's translation)
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Author: Homer ("Smyrns of Chios")
Source: The Odyssey (bk. III, l. 142), (Pope's translation)
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Wit is the lowest form of humor.
Author: Alexander Pope
Source: None
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Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
Author: H. G. Wells
Source: None
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
Author: George Santayana
Source: None
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Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been different.
Author: Blaise Pascal
Source: None
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The fate of a nation has often depended on the food or bad digestion of a prime minister.
Author: Voltaire
Source: None
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I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Author: Henry Adams
Source: None
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History repeats itself; historians repeat each other.
Author: Philip Guedalla
Source: None
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History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play on the dead.
Author: Voltaire
Source: None
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The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed.
Author: Samuel Johnson
Source: None
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The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Author: Voltaire
Source: None
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The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Author: Mark Twain
Source: None
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Anecdotes are the gleaming toys of history. The history of mankind is little else than a narrative of designs which have failed and hopes that have been disappointed.
Author: Samuel Johnson
Source: None
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History: A distillation of rumor.
Author: Thomas Carlyle
Source: None
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History would be wonderful thing - if it were only true.
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Source: None
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The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
Author: Anon.
Source: None
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History belongs to the winner.
Author: Anon.
Source: None
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History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there.
Author: Anon.
Source: None
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We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.
Author: Anon.
Source: None
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Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.
Author: Mary Coleridge
Source: None
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History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.
Author: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Source: None
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Just as philosophy is the study of other people's misconceptions, so history is the study of other people's mistakes.
Author: Phillip Guedalla
Source: None
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History repeats itself; historians repeat each other.
Author: Phillip Guedala
Source: None
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Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.
Author: Philip Howard
Source: None
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All history, of course, is the history of wars.
Author: Penelope Lively
Source: None
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Give the historians something to write about.
Author: Propertius
Source: None
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