Quotes about history

“How does it feel to have just changed the course of history?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the navigator. “To my way of thinking, by the time history happens I’m going to be dead.”

Papa Hegel he say that all we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. I know people who can't even learn from what happened this morning. Hegel must have been taking the long view.

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

I know it seems incredible, that already some of the younger men are beginning to doubt the greatness of the Change our world has undergone, but read — read the newspapers of that time. Every age becomes mitigated and a little ennobled in our minds as it recedes into the past. It is the part of those who like myself have stories of that time as well, to supply, by a scrupulous spiritual realism, some antidote to that glamour.

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

The purpose of history is to explain the present—to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power—profound power. The power to define a whole society.

He had only imagined a slower fighting style from an unconscious assumption that man in the past were weaker or slower or less imaginative than he was, as a modern man.

Marek knew this assumption of superiority was a difficulty faced by every historian. He just hadn’t thought he was guilty of it.

But clearly, he was.

He had a term for people like this: temporal provincials—people who were ignorant of the past, and proud of it.

Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.

“But in theory…”

“When we are dealing with history, theories are worthless,” Doniger said with a contemptuous wave. “A theory is only valuable if it has the ability to predict future outcomes. But history is the record of human action—and no theory can predict human action.”

“The so-called time paradoxes,” Doniger said, “do not really involve time. They involve ideas about history that are seductive but wrong. Seductive, because they flatter you into thinking you can have an impact on the course of events. And wrong, because of course, you can’t.”