History Quotes - Page 45

War makes rattling good history.

Also, what mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.

At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

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

History is a great dust heap.

The whole past is the procession of the present.

For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

History: A distillation of rumor.

How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.

If you go back through 2000 years, I guess luck, Marx, and God have made history, the three of them together.

It is well indeed for out land that we of this generation have learned to think nationally.

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

Posterity allows to every man his true value and proper honours.

History is a stern judge.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.