Quotes on History

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes.

The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Revisionism is a healthy historiographical process, and no one, not even revisionists, should be exempt from it.

History proves nothing because it contains everything.

History is not history unless it is the truth.

History furnishes to politics all the arguments that it needs, for the chosen cause.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.

Man in a word has no nature; what he has... is history.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

History is the distillation of rumour.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.