History is the most fundamental science, for there is no human knowledge which cannot lose its scientific character when men forget the conditions under which it originated, the questions which it answered, and the function it was created to serve.

— Benjamin Farrington (1949), Irish classicist, author, activist, popularizer of history/science

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material—books, pamphlets, periodicals, etc.—and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

— Barbara Tuchman (1981), American historian, journalist, author, educator, Pulitzer Prize (2), popularizer of history

History is not just about the things we like or the people we want to love and admire – a fantasy date with our favorite dead person. It is about the events in the past that have mattered greatly to a given society and its culture.

— Annette Gordon-Reed (2008), contemporary American historian, educator, attorney, author, Pultizer Prize, popularizer of history

Fools say they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by other people’s experience.

The study of history offers that opportunity in the widest possible measure. It is universal experience, infinitely longer, wider, and more varied than any individual’s experience.

— B. H. Liddell Hart (1944), British military historian & theorist, soldier

Otto Von Bismarck, (1815 - 1898), Prusso-German statesman and diplomat

Why limit yourself to the experience of your own relatively brief time on earth, according to your biological clock, when the whole realm of the human experience reaching back infinitely far is available to you?

— David McCullough (??), American historian, author, Pulitizer Prize (2), popularizer of history

In truth, the whole situation, in respect to history, is described in that well-known conversation between the Englishman and the play-actor. “Why is it?”, asked the clergyman, “that you who represent what everybody knows to be false obtain more attention than we who deal in the most momentous realities?”

“It is,” said the actor, “because you represent the truth so that it seems like fiction, while we depict fiction in such manner that it has the effect of truth.”

— Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1883), American minister, educator, social reformer and soldier

Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own times.

— Gustave Flaubert (1871), French novelist

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

— George Macaulay Trevelyan (1949), English historian, educator, author

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

— Aldous Huxley (1956), English/American writer, critic and philosopher

Engaging students in the process of constructing understanding and meaning of the past is a central act of history education. To do so demands a paradigm shift for students who have been taught to consider the past as an established external truth that is to be memorized.

— Craig Perrier (2016), contemporary American historian, educator, content creator, popularizer of history

In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office.

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

— Thomas B. Macaulay (1828), English historian, poet, politician, writer

…History ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It's written, not to revere the dead, but inspire the living. It’s our cultural bloodstream—the secret of who we are. And it tells us to let go of the past, even as we honour it, to lament what ought to be lamented, to celebrate what should be celebrated.

— Simon Schama (2002), contemporary English historian, educator, popularizer of history

One of the hardest things to realise, specially for a young man, is that our forefathers were living men who really knew something, I would go further and say they knew a very great deal.

Indeed, I should not be surprised if they knew quite as much as we do about things that really concern men.

What each generation forgets is that while the words which it uses to describe ideas are always changing, the ideas themselves do not change so quickly, nor are those ideas in any sense new.

— Rudyard Kipling (1923), influential English writer, novelist, Nobel laureate

As a Nation, we need to develop an historical perspective in analyzing change. Too often, newspapers report important political, economic, or social events without supplying the necessary historical context.

We are all now accustomed to reading headlines about the latest test scores. Whether up or down, they invariably overstate the meaning of a single year’s change. And the same short-sightedness often flaws journalistic reports of other major educational trends…

We must struggle mightily against the contemporary tendency towards presentism, the idea inspired by television journalism that today’s news has no precedent.

— Diane Ravitch (1993), contemporary American educational historian, policy analyst, educator, activist, author

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

— David McCullough (1992), American historian, author, Pulitzer Prize (2), popularizer of history

It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.

— Stephen Ambrose (2002), American historian, educator, author, popularizer of history

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer…

Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.

— Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.(1962, 1949), American historian, educator, government official, Pulitzer Prize (2)

I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.

Allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families, and the public figures we have respected in our history, just as Abraham Lincoln wanted to believe, really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives.

— Doris Kearns Goodwin (2008), contemporary American historian, educator, author, Pulitzer Prize, popularizer of history

History Quotes