Quotes about history

“Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest.”, p. 226, 2013

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.

All history is modern history.

I knew that it was human nature which lay at the root of History and that no matter where I found myself I was bound to discover superficial similarities expressing and exemplifying that nature. It was human idealism and human impatience and human despair which continued to produce these terrible wars. Human virtues and vices, mixed and confused in individuals, created what we called “History”. Yet I could see no way in which the vicious circle of aspiration and desperation might ever be broken. We were all victims of our own imagination.

Because the prehistoric cultures endured for so many chiliads, they have shaped our heritage in such a way as to cause us to behave as if their conditions obtained today.

Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.

Perhaps coming from the royal family, I had easier emotional access to a sense of Toromon’s history. Even at its best, that’s all an aristocracy is good for.

Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers, — Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin… Alas the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers, — nor is it Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the other, — her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the quidnunc, spy, and Taproom Wit, — that there may ever continue more than one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forebears in forever, — not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could lose us All, — rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only their Destination in Common.

Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power, — who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government.

History handed Lenin a gift in the shape of the First World War. He grasped it with both hands and used it to craft an insurrection. It is revolutions that make history happen. Liberals of every sort, with rare exceptions, are found on the other side.