Quotes on History

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

The Reichswirtschaftsministerium ('Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs') tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Our best history is still poetry.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

There is a history in all men's lives.

If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.

As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context-in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.

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 may be called thought.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

You and I were long friends: you are now my enemy, and I am yours.

Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.