“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Source: Letters of Thomas Jefferson
Quotes about history page 10
“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”
Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker
As quoted in Wake-up Calls : You Don't Have to Sleepwalk through your Life, Love, or Career! (1992) by Eric Allenbaugh, p. 65
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic
Hawthorne http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/hjj/nhhj1.html, (1879) ch. I: The Early Years.
“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.”
Evelyn Fox Keller (1936) American physicist, author and feminist
Source: Reflections on Gender and Science
“Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.”
Erica Jong (1942) Novelist, poet, memoirist, critic
“Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”
Arundhati Roy book The God of Small Things
Source: The God of Small Things
Howard Zinn book A People's History of the United States
Source: A People's History of the United States
Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer
Source: Smooth Talking Stranger
Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist
Attributed in Banned Books Week '93: Celebrating the Freedom to Read (1993) by Robert P. Doyle, p. 62
1990s
Robert Anton Wilson book The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Part I : The Eye in the Pyramid, p. 32
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)
“History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.”
Carol Tavris (1944) American psychologist
Source: Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
“History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.”
Michel Faber book The Crimson Petal and the White
Source: The Crimson Petal and the White
James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
As quoted in "Doom and glory of knowing who you are" by Jane Howard, in LIFE magazine, Vol. 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89 https://books.google.com/books?id=mEkEAAAAMBAJ; a part of this statement has often been quoted as it was paraphrased in The New York Times (1 June 1964): <br class="br">Context: You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else can tell, what it is like to be alive.
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer
“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
Source: The Poisonwood Bible
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States
“History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”
Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby
Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 39
“There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.”
Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor
John Fowles book The Collector
Source: The Collector
Jenna Black (1965) American writer
Source: Shadowspell
“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”
Anatole Broyard (1920–1990) American literary critic
‘About Books, Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling’, New York Times, February 22, 1987.
Claudio Magris (1939) Italian scholar, translator and writer
Source: Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”
Stacy Schiff (1961) American female Author, Pulitzer Prize winner
Source: Cleopatra: A Life
“That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”
Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad
Source: A Visit from the Goon Squad
Antony Beevor (1946) English military historian
Source: The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939
“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”
Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath
Cosmic Trigger II : Down to Earth
Source: Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth
“The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.”
Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin
Source: Let the Great World Spin (2009), Book One: A Fear of Love
James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)
As quoted in The Story of Our Money (1946) by Olive Cushing Dwinell, p. 71; this is in an author's note following a quote by Alexander Hamilton. After the author's note there is the sentence "From Writings of Madison, previously quoted. Vol. 2, p. 14". This is apparently an editor's error since the note is clearly Dwinell's. See the talk page for more details.
Misattributed
“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”
Eugen Weber (1925–2007) American historian
Alexis De Tocqueville book The Old Regime and the Revolution
Original text: On voit que l'histoire est une galerie de tableaux où il y a peu d'originaux et beaucoup de copies. <br class="br">Variant translation: History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. <br class="br">Old Regime (1856), p. 88 http://books.google.com/books?id=N50aibeL8BAC&pg=PA88&vq=%22history,+it+is+easily+perceived%22&source=gbs_search_r&cad=1_1 <br class="br">1850s and later
Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian
“My heart broke open and history fell in.”
Salman Rushdie The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Source: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
“Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel
Source: Infidel (2007), Chapter 13: Leiden
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.”
Jenny Han (1980) American writer
Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty
“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
Richard Brautigan The Tokyo-Montana Express
Page 150
The Tokyo-Montana Express
Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet
Sir Walter Scott Collection Guy Mannering. Chap. xxxvii.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”
William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker
“the history of melancholia
includes all of us.”
Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell
Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell