“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

Speech in the House of Commons (January 23, 1948), cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred R. Shapiro, Yale University Press, p. 154 ISBN 0300107986
This quote may be the basis for a statement often attributed to Churchill : History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all Parties to leave the past to history, especially as I …" by Winston S. Churchill?
Winston S. Churchill photo
Winston S. Churchill 601
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965

Related quotes

J. B. Bury photo
Stephanie Powell Watts photo

“I think it is a natural impulse to look to your own past and history to discover the stories that move and inspire you. The problem is that the past is nebulous and waiting for a shape. What ultimately gives it form and context is the present. That’s the part of writing inspired by personal history that is exciting to me.”

On using personal history in “Fruits of the Same Tree: An Interview with Stephanie Powell Watts” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-stephanie-powell-watts/ in Fiction Writers Review (2012 Aug 6)

Edward Augustus Freeman photo

“I have actually sat down to make a distinct History of the Norman Conquest, which I can do easier than anybody else, as I have worked so much at the subject for twenty years past, that is, a great part of the story; there will be little more to do than to write down what is already in my head.”

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) English historian (1823-1892)

Source: Letter to Dean Hook (23 December 1865), quoted in W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Volume I (1895), p. 335

Thomas Jefferson photo

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to John Adams (1 August 1816)
1810s

Halldór Laxness photo

“When I discovered that history is a fable, and a poor one at that, I started looking for a better fable, and found theology.”

Pastor Jón Prímus
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

John Mayer photo

“Who says I can’t be free?
From all of the things that I used to be.
Re-write my history.
Who says I can’t be free?”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Who Says
Song lyrics, Battle Studies (2009)

Henri Barbusse photo

“I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past!”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition
Context: I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past! And at that moment I feel, weeping within me and dragging itself from some little bygone trifle, a new and tragical sorrow in dying, a hunger to be warm once more in the rain and the cold: to enclose myself in myself in spite of space, to hold myself back, to live.

“My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.”

Girl, Interrupted (1994)
Context: It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The motive is paramount. Without a strong motive, you’re sunk. My motives were weak: an American-history paper I didn’t want to write and the question I’d asked months earlier, Why not kill myself? Dead, I wouldn’t have to write the paper. Nor would I have to keep debating the question.

Charles Lamb photo

“I like you and your book, ingenious Hone!
In whose capacious all-embracing leaves
The very marrow of tradition 's shown;
And all that history, much that fiction weaves.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

To the Editor of the Every-Day Book; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Related topics