Quotes about history

Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.

The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.

So long as men remember the wrongs done to their forebears, no peace will ever exist.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.

A second slash ended the monster’s misery. So, he thought, this is how my Earthling ancestors ran their affairs. This is how lands were won, empires expanded, insurrections resisted, prisoners taken, slaves kept, heretics converted, captives made loquacious. For the first time in his life, Minnix felt himself a part of history.

History, he decided, was a terrible idea.

Historians whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted. In fact, in a study of history the illusion of inevitability has serious consequences that it is one of the few things that both conservative and socialist historians can agree on.

What’s the point of history, if it has nothing to say to the present?

When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.

As for history, we are living in its ruins. And as for biographies, we are living with the consequences of all the decisions ever made in them. I tend not to read them for pleasure. It‘s not unlike carefully scrutinizing the map when one has already reached the destination.

Our lethargic modernity certainly knows how to “think historically,” but it has long doubted that it lives in a meaningful history.

Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend.