History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. Ambrose Bierce

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past--so, good night! Thomas Jefferson to John Adams

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit. Hunter S. Thompson

History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world. Heraclitus

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other. Philip Guedalla

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. Milton Friedman

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. Henry Ford

All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography. Ralph Waldo Emerson

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. Mark Twain

English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did. Malcolm Bradbury

History is the zoology of the human race. Franz Grill Parzer

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated. Johan Huizinga

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it. Walter Bagehot

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Abba Eban

The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit. D. H. Lawrence

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. Thomas Huxley

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H. G. Wells

History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking. Nikolai Chernyshevsky

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors. Jorge Luis Borges

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past trying to reconstruct its themes, revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days. Winston Churchill

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. George Orwell

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Albert Einstein

Because men really respect only that which was founded of old and has developed slowly, he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past. Friedrich Nietzsche

The past is all holy to us; the dead are all holy; even they that were wicked when alive. Thomas Carlyle

Study the past if you would divine the future. Confucius

Therefore Agathon rightly says: “Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been.” Aristotle

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends. Max Beerbohm

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause. Henri Louis Bergson

Not heaven itself upon the past has power/But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour. John Dryden

Oh! the good times when we were so unhappy. Alexandre Dumas (the elder)

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causes you to bump into people not going your way. Edna Ferber

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame. George Eliot

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time. Francis Bacon

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. Oscar Wilde

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet. Cyril Connolly

What is past is prologue. Shakespeare

My future will not copy fair my past/On any leaf but Heaven’s. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The best of prophets of the future is the past. Byron

Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft. Winston Churchill