I’ve collected the following hodgepodge of quotations about  history and historians from a variety of sources, including lists prepared by historians Valerie French, Steven Kreis and Richard W. Slatta and by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.  Please let me know of additions, corrections or misattributions by writing me at: bgriff@american.edu

The Past

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. -- Anonymous

Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present, for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time. --Richard White

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. --  George Santayana

The past is a place of fantasy. - -Hayden White

What is History?

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future. -- Stephen Spender

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

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living constantly remake."  - - Robert Penn Warren

"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'"
-- James Joyce, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

People are trapped in History, and History is trapped in them! --James Baldwin

We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators. -- Andrea Dworkin,

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. -- Karl Marx

[W]e cannot escape history. -- Abraham Lincoln.

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

What is history but a fable agreed upon? -- Napoleon Bonaparte

History is more or less bunk. – Henry Ford.

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.  --Voltaire
 

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics, in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such, and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future; the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit." Tom Robbins

History is past Politics; and Politics present History.  -Edward Freeman

There is properly no history, only biography.  --Emerson

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest for his daily bread and butter. -- Hendrick Willem van Loon

History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . . I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all. -- Jane Austen (1775-1817)

History belongs to the winner. -- Anon.
 

How should historians study the past?  

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office.  It will merely tell how it really was. -- Leopold von Ranke (emphasis added.)

No historian can take part with - or against - the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. -- Henry Adams

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes. -- Francis Parkman

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. -- Cervantes

OR

Can We every really know the past?

Reality happens to be, like a landscape, possessed of an infinite number of perspectives, all equally veracious and authentic. The sole false perspective is that which claims to be the only one there is.  -- José Ortega  y Gasset

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time. -- Frederick Jackson Turner

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. Adrienne Rich

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. -- Simon Schama  

It is among history’s virtues that it is, at last, impossible.  No tale, of course, can capture much of the past, so every narrative, blatant in its incompleteness, just come upon the mind as an artifice, a willed confection, always questionable, with luck entertaining, and entertainment is not the least of history’s purposes.  Not only is every tale partial and artful, but there is no obvious order in the past, no single construct that can satisfactorily encompass the change and sameness that any account requires for accuracy.  Disorderly, fragmentary, malleable, history leaves room for diverse participation.  The professionals cannot do it perfectly, so all can take a turn.  They must.  Everyone is obliged by history’s cultural importance and its clear use in planning, to try at times to pull a little account of the past into order, to act like a historian.  Author unidentified.
 

 History is a way of learning.  As such, it begins by leaving the present; by going back into the heretofore, by beginning again.  Only be grasping what we were is it possible to see how we changed, to understand the process and the nature of the modifications, and to gain some perspective on what we are.  The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back.  Rather is it one of going back into the past and returning to the present with a wide and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook.  We return with a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armed with a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices.  In this manner it is possible to loosen the clutch of the past and transform it into a living tool for the present and the future. --  William A. Williams, History As A Way of Learning.

The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present. Edward Hallett Carr, 1892-1982, British historian

 As often happens in the search after truth, if we have answered one question, we have raised many more; if we have followed one track home, we have had to pass by others that opened off it and led, or seemed to lead, to far other goals.   --  Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars. -- Charles A. Beard

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history. -- Anon.

What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.  -- Hegel 

History and Community

A people without history is like wind upon the buffalo grass. -- old Teton Sioux saying.

However far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.  -- Yoruba saying.  
 

As we discover, we remember; and as we remember, we discover; and all the more intensely do we remember when our stories converge.  -- Eudora Welty

For better or worse, I think one of the things I am supposed to do is challenge and even upset students. Not because unhappiness is good in and of itself. Far from it. But, increasingly, Americans are a people without history, with only memory, which means a people poorly prepared for what is inevitable about life -- tragedy, sadness, moral ambiguity -- and, therefore, a people reluctant to engage difficult ethical issues. Consumer culture is mostly about denial, about forgetting the past, except insofar as the past is pleasant and, thus, marketable. As historians, we occupy one tiny space where the richness of the past is kept alive, where its complexity is acknowledged and studied, where competing voices can still be heard. One of the most important things historians do is to bear witness to the past, including its horrors, in order to battle the amnesia that would sweep away all that is difficult or repugnant. The distinction between history and memory -- that is, the distinction between knowledge of painful things, painfully arrived at, and notions of the past that flatter us with easy myths or cheap emotions -- is at the heart of our enterprise.  --Elliott J. Gorn