Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

The Thames is liquid history.

History is the devil's scripture.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

While we read history we make history.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

I can see only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

History is more or less bunk.

The history of mankind is his character.

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.

However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time.

A land without ruins is a land without memories -- a land without memories is a land without history.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

There is a history in all men's lives.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian -- ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Never forget the importance of history. To know nothing of what happened before you took your place on earth, is to remain a child for ever and ever.

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.