“History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been liberalized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that’s what’s happened, you know. We’re still busy bleeding to death, but we haven’t far to go now.”

— Poul Anderson, book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 50-51)

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

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Do you have more details about the quote "History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glor…" by Poul Anderson?

Poul Anderson140

American science fiction and fantasy writer 1926–2001

Walter P. Stacy (1884–1951) American judge

State v. Beal http://books.google.com/books?id=lEFOAQAAIAAJ&q=%22it+would+be+almost+unbelievable+if+history+did+not+record+the+tragic+fact+that+men+have+gone+to+war+and+cut+each+other's+throats+because+they+could+not+agree+as+to+what+was+to+become+of+them+after+their+throats+were+cut%22&pg=PA302#v=onepage, 199 N.C. 278 (1930).

“A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed. In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 8

“In such a picture the artist may depart from actual fact, from what actually was, so long as he does not exceed what might have been.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 78

“If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

“Prentice: It's a fascinating theory, sir, and cleverly put together. Does it tie in with known facts?
Rance: That need not cause us undue anxiety. Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

What the Butler Saw (1969), Act I

“There is a mistake into which several have fallen, and have deceived others, and perhaps themselves, by clothing some false reasoning in what they called a mathematical dress, imagining that by the application of mathematical symbols to their subject, they secured mathematical argument. This could not have happened if they had possessed a knowledge of the bounds within which the empire of mathematics is contained. That empire is sufficiently wide, and might have been better known, had the time which has been wasted in aggressions upon the domains of others, been spent in exploring the immense tracts which are yet untrodden.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

“I'd rather be a 'could-be' if I cannot be an 'are' because a 'could-be' is a 'maybe' who is reaching for a star. I'd rather be a 'has-been' than a 'might-have-been' by far; for a 'might-have-been' has never been, but a 'has' was once an 'are.”

Milton Berle (1908–2002) American comedian and actor

“If the next generation of people to take over the West does not know how to think, western civilization will come apart and it will be replaced in the way that civilizations before it have been. ...What we face is a very dire problem.”

Bret Weinstein (1969) biologist, professor, public intellectual

Speak Freely (Sept 14, 2018)

“Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

statement (c. 1965), quoted in " An irreverent best-seller by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gives nerds a good name http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20091337,00.html", People Magazine (22 July 1985)

“So what does it matter where it was when it was hit? We could have sunk it if it'd been tied up on the quayside in a neutral port and everyone would still have been delighted.”

Alan Clark (1928–1999) British politician

May 15, 1983; page 5.
On the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War.
Diaries: In Power (1993)

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