The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been “great changes.”
History Quotes
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
History is not always written in the blood of rolling heads. Paper is the equal to steel in the stuff of momentous events.
I have no history but the length of my bones.
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; […]
A military leader of the first class cannot be content merely to win: he must also fight elegantly. History will not overlook his least little gesture, the minutest detail of his generalship. Historians will either improve his image by judicious chiseling and polishing or else represent him as a lucky deadhead and nothing more.
This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.
A land without ruins is a land without memories – a land without memories is a land without history.
