They that would know what shall be must consider what hath been.
History Quotes
You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Studying history warns against making it.
A historian is a prophet in reverse.
Those who don’t study the past will repeat its errors; those who do study it will find other ways to err.
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history […]
The humanities will always be heavily influenced by the work of the dead white men of Europe, for they have been history’s troublemakers, the fomenters of revolutions and inventions, the impetus of change, the implacable enemies of the silence in which humanity perishes. No other great body of work invites criticism or denies loneliness to […]
What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War – he had failed to record the exact date – had found himself in communion, not just […]
