Quotes on History

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

History is a tragegy, not a morality tale.

Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.

History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Animals are molded by natural forces they do not comprehend. To their minds there is no past and no future. There is only the everlasting present of a single generation, its trails in the forest, its hidden pathways in the the air and in the sea. There is nothing in the Universe more alone than Man. He has entered into the strange world of history.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

History takes time. History makes memory.

History is written by the victors.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

Let us be patient with one another,_x000D_ _x000D_ And even patient with ourselves._x000D_ _x000D_ We have a long, long way to go._x000D_ _x000D_ So let us hasten along the road,_x000D_ _x000D_ The road of human tenderness and generosity._x000D_ _x000D_ Groping, we may find one another's hands in the dark.

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people. I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human, more civilized for their children, and for their children's children.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.