Memorable Quotations about History

"What is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history?" Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838)

"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford (1863-1947), Chicago Tribune (25 May 1916)

"History is past politics, and politics is present history." E.A. Freeman (1823-92), Methods of Historical Study (1886)

"History... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon (1737-94), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)

"History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." Philip Guedalla (1889-1944), Supers and Supermen (1920)

"What experience and history teach is this -- that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it." G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (1830)

"The history of England is emphatically the history of progress." Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), Edinburgh Review (1843)

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana (1863-1952), Life of Reason (1905)

"What will history say? History, sir, will tell lies as usual." George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), The Devil's Disciple (1901)

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Intentions (1891)