Quotes about history

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Cleopatra's nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.

History is of two kinds—there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events—a scandalous chronicle.

In the end, man is not entirely guilty — he did not start history. Nor is he wholly innocent — he continues it.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.”

“I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said.

“I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp."

Although it is easy to fit any given segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history, contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns.

History a distillation of Rumour.

History, however, is not a congeniality contest. How we rate Henry for likability today is of little consequence. What matters is what he did in his own time, how he optimized for the standards of his own age, and what the consequences were of his relatively short life and reign.

This is a more straightforward assessment to make. In his day, the weight of opinion was that Henry was somewhere close to the paragon of kingship, measured both by his personal bearing and by his political and military achievements.

Even in the face of superhuman machine intelligence, it can be tempting to imagine that the world will keep looking the way it has over the last few decades of our relatively short lives. It is true, but hard to remember, that there was a time is real as our own time, just a few short centuries ago, when civilization was radically different. Or millennia ago, when there was no civilization to speak of. Or a million years ago, when there were no humans. Or a billion years ago, when multicellular colonies had no specialized cells.

Adopting a historical perspective can help us appreciate what is so hard to see from the perspective of our own short lifespans: Nature permits disruption. Nature permits calamity. Nature permits the world to never be the same again.

Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from the dictates of governments and the results of battles, but through vast numbers of people changing their minds — sometimes only a little bit.

But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.