The Last Word

Friday, May 18, 2007

By A.S. Erickson

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
—Edward Gibbon

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
—Thomas Jefferson

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
—George Bernard Shaw

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.
—Cicero

The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated into a contemporary antagonism known as the generation gap.
—Spiro T. Agnew

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy

History is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid.
—Livy

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
—Walter Lippmann

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
—George Orwell

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
—Sir Winston Churchill

History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity.
—Friedrich von Schiller

Nothing is in intellect which has not been in history, and everything that was in history should also be in intellect.
—Gustav Spet

It’s my belief that history is a wheel. ‘Inconstancy is my very essence,’ says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.
—Boethius

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
—W.H. Auden

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
—Walter Bageho

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today—and in fact we have forgotten.
—Euripides

Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
—Gustave Flaubert

History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
—Edmund Burke

The Last Word

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