History

Wrongly (see below: H.B. Meyers) attributed to Franklin Pierce Adams - Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.

Jacques Barzun (in From Dawn to Decadence, 2000) - History cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars.

Lewis Carroll - “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.

Apocryphal Chinese curse - May you live in interesting times.

John Carey - One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.

Cioran - L’Histoire est l’ironie en marche, le ricanement de l’Esprit à travers les hommes et les évènements.

Ray Cummings (science fiction writer, 1922) - Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

Mario Cuomo (Commencement Address at Iona College, 3 June 1984) - Most of us have achieved levels of affluence and comfort unthought of two generations ago. We've never had it so good, most of us. Nor have we ever complained so bitterly about our problems.

Sir Winston Churchill - The Balkans have had more history than they can consume.

Pieter Geyl - History is indeed an argument without end.

Antonio Gramsci - The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. Italian original : La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati. French translation : La crise consiste précisément en ce que le monde ancien se meurt et que le nouveau ne peut naître : pendant cet intervalle, il se manifeste une grande variété de symptomes morbides.

Stephen Hawking (October 2016 lecture, Cambridge) - History (...), let’s face it, is mostly the history of stupidity.

Friedrich Hayek - Religious prophets and ethical philosophers have of course at all times been mostly reactionaries, defending the old against the new principles. Indeed, in most parts of the world the development of an open market economy has long been prevented by those very morals preached by prophets and philosophers, even before government measures did the same. We must admit that modern civilization has become largely possible by the disregard of the injunctions of those indignant moralists.

Joseph Heath - There’s a reason that civilization collapses into barbarism, and not the other way around.

Joseph Heath - The upshot of [Norbert Elias’s history of table manners] is that the average ten-year-old in our society exercises more self-control than most European adults were even capable of three or four centuries ago.

Hegel - What experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Hegel - History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.

Eric Hoffer - The change that matters is the change of a society’s maxims. The 1960s saw a slaughter of axioms.

Dhruva Jaishankar - Just as history is often written by the winners, it is rarely forgotten by the losers.

William James - In general time filled with varied and interesting experiences seems short in passing, but long as we look back. On the other hand, a tract of time empty of experiences seems long in passing, but in retrospect short.

Karl Jaspers - Succumb neither to the past nor to the future. It is important to be completely in the present (German original: Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein.)

James Joyce (in Ulysses, 1922) - History (...) is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Daniel Kahneman (in Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011) - The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Samantha Kleinberg (in Why? A Guide to Finding and Using Causes, 2016) - The probability of an unlikely event happening to an individual may be low, but the probability of it happening somewhere is not.

Leo Longanesi (December 1938, published in Parliamo dell'elefante, 1947) - Marching bands, flags, parades. An idiot is an idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a historical force. Italian original: Fanfare, bandiere, parate. Uno stupido è uno stupido. Due stupidi sono due stupidi. Diecimila stupidi sono una forza storica. 

Margaret McMillan - I am always wary of the lessons of the past. There’s a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.

Margaret McMillan - “These days,” the Russians say, “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.”

H. B. Meyers (in the May 1913 issue of The American Food Journal) - A certain class of people are fond of talking about “the good old days,” but they are for the most part individuals without imagination and with a very poor memory. As a matter of fact, there never was a time in the history of the world when the days were as good as they are right now in this year of our Lord 1913.

Joel Mokyr (October 2015) - My job as an economic historian is to point out that the good old days were old but not good, and to remind us just how much better life is today than it was 50 or 100 years ago.

Elliott Murphy (in Night Lights, 1976) - The past is the only thing that lasts.

Pascal Ory - En histoire culturelle, une idée fausse est un fait vrai.

Alex Rosenberg - Epistemically credible explanations successively narrow down their disagreements with their predecessors. Historical explanations don’t.

Alex Rosenberg - We no longer believe that the earth is the center of the universe. Why do we still believe in historical narrative?

George Santayana (in The Life of Reason, 1905) - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Helmut Schoeck (in Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior, 1966) - Most of the achievements which distinguish members of modern, highly developed and diversified societies from members of primitive societies—the development of civilization, in short—are the result of innumerable defeats inflicted on envy, i.e., on man as an envious being. 

Karl Sharro (Twitter, 28/12/2019) - History is over, we're just going through the comments section.

Justin E.H. Smith - The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational, mutates, as a rule, into spectacular outbursts of irrationality.

Justin E.H. Smith - Any triumph of reason (...) is temporary and reversible.

Thomas Sowell - How can anyone read history and still trust politicians?

Alex Tabarrok - History does not always tell the parables that we wish to hear.

A. J. P. Taylor - Like most of those who study history, [Napoléon] learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

Tradional - History does not repeat itself, historians repeat one another.

Leon Trotsky paraphrase - You can ignore history but it won't ignore you. (Derived from: You say you are not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.)

Miguel de Unamuno - Procuremos más ser padres de nuestro porvenir que hijos de nuestro pasado. English: Let us strive to be the parents of our future rather than the children of our past.

Paul Valéry - L’Histoire justifie ce que l’on veut. Elle n’enseigne rigoureusement rien, car elle contient tout, et donne des exemples de tout.  [...] L'histoire est la science des choses qui ne se répètent pas. English: History validates what we want it to validate. It teaches absolutely nothing, because it contains everything and gives examples of everything. [...] History is the "science" of non-recurring phenomena.

Paul Valéry - L’Histoire est la science des choses qui ne se répètent pas. English: History is the science of things that only occur once.

Paul Valéry (in Discours de l’histoire, 1932) - L’Histoire est le produit le plus dangereux que la chimie de l’intellect ait élaboré. Ses propriétés sont bien connues. Il fait rêver, il enivre les peuples, leur engendre de faux souvenirs, exagère leurs réflexes, entretient leurs vieilles plaies, les tourmente dans leur repos, les conduit au délire des grandeurs ou à celui de la persécution et rend les nations amères, superbes, insupportables et vaines.

Alfred North Whitehead - It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.

Alfred North Whitehead - The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

Oscar Wilde (in The Critic as Artist, pt. 1, 1891) - The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.