Pithy Sayings

History

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
[Winston Churchill, 1874 to 1965, British Prime Minister during World War II]

Just remember, search the parks in the world's cities; there are no statues to committees.
[From Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs, 2006]

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
[From The Life of Reason; Vol. 1 by George Santayana, 1905]

History is like a deaf man replying to questions which nobody puts to him.
[Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, quoted in Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin, 1978]

Historians, it is said, fall into one of three categories. Those who lie. Those who are mistaken. Those who do not know.
[Anonymous, quoted in Legends, Lies & Cherished Myths of World History by Richard Shenkman, 1993]

Civilisation is distinguished more by its erratic cycles of uncontrolled growth and collapse than by any inherent tendency towards stability. Time and again, it has risen dramatically from the field of human endeavour, then collapsed and fallen. Human ingenuity drives the process. Human inability to impose adequate restraint brings it down.
[From Man on Earth by John Reader, 1988]

What experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 to 1831]

History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel.
[From Accelerando by Charles Stross, 2005]

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
[From Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner, 1951]