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

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.
~ Francis Bacon

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
~ Woody Allen

To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.
~ Sir Max Beerbohm

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

Historian. A broad -- gauge gossip.
~ Ambrose Bierce

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
~ Otto Von Bismarck

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors.
~ Edmund Burke

The Thames is liquid history.
~ John Burns

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.
~ Samuel Butler

And having wisdom with each studious year, in meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, and shaped his weapon with an edge severe, sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer.
~ Lord Byron

History is the devil's scripture.
~ Lord Byron

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
~ Albert Camus

History is the distillation of rumor.
~ Thomas Carlyle

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
~ Thomas Carlyle

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
~ Thomas Carlyle

The whole past is the procession of the present.
~ Thomas Carlyle

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.
~ Miguel De Cervantes

History is but a confused heap of facts.
~ Lord Chesterfield