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History and Historians Quotes and Quotations
 After 15 years of work I have achieved, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, the unity of the German nation, and have freed it from the death sentence of Versailles.  History is a vast early warning system. History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it. History is the devil's scripture. History is the essence of innumerable biographies. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. In essence, the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters. Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach. The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians. The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally. - Saki When the historian, Charles A. Beard was asked about the lessons from history, he said there were four: 1. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 2. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. 3. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. 4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. History doesn't pass the dishes again. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all; the conscientious historian will correct these defects. 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 made no nuisance of themselves in the world. Nostalgia is a seductive liar. It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can - it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence. It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable. History is philosophy learned from examples. History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts. Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years. I never realized that there was history, close at hand, beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history. All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man. The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter. The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward. Biography is history seen through the prism of a person. The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends. Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past. History is: Fables agreed upon - Voltaire The biography of a few stout and earnest persons - Ralph Waldo Emerson A vast Mississippi of falsehood - Matthew Arnold A confused heap of facts - Lord Chesterfield A cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man - With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. Give the historians something to write about. Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do. War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading. The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality. History is past politics; and politics present history. The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. - Stendhal One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations. History, n: an account mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence. Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history. History is more or less bunk. I have no history but the length of my bones. History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass. The function of posterity is to look after itself. The world's history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results. History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes. - Voltaire We should keep the Panama Canal. After all we stole it fair and square. The history of things that didn't happen has never been written. The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class. Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry. 
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