Great quotes from famous historians.

I am reading "The Light of Greece" by Will Durant and although some of his theories are outdated he was a great writer. I love some of his quotes and will probably find more as I read this huge volume. I am on page 137 out of 671 pages.

Add any quotes you want from any great historian.

Will Durant:

A-Will Durant Quotes: The Light of Greece

Civilization is always older than we think; and under what soil we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time. Page 17
Civilizations come and go; they conquer the Earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation. Page 33

Legend is often a fragment of history swelling with new fictions as it rolls down the years. Page 44

Precedent dominates law because precedent is custom, and custom is the Jealous older brother of law. Page 54

So old are the youngest excuses of the will to power. Page 55
Men must have their phrases if they are to give their lives. Page 55
Art may make even terror beautiful – and so purify it- by giving it significance and form. Page 56

I accept that there are only a few similarities and many differences between Peloponnisos War and WW-2.

(E. H. Carr, What is History, Sub: Can history make classifacitons like other sciences?)

In a few words, there are few great authors or men (women) who have made as many worthwile sentences that can be quoted as those of Samuel Clemens known to most of us as "Mark Twain! However, in this "nazified" world of "political correctness" which has swept thru the United States of America, and possibly Europe?, any writer who made use of the word "nigger" has been cast into the dustbin of the past! Alas, and alack, it seems old Mark Twain, has been so snubbed by our new academia! But, as you will find out from this site; http://www.twainquotes.com/History.html

This quaint, giant of a man, was well ahead of his times!

The only other American, who I feel can come close to having a very good (honest) view of both man and mankind, may well be the great American humorist with the name of Will Rogers!


Edited by opuslola - 04-Oct-2009 at 15:27

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
Lord Bolingbroke

 

 

This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
Tacitus

 

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy

"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed; whence a total separation of affections, interests, political obligations, and all manner of connections, by which the whole state is weakened."

--Benjamin Franklin, Emblematical Representations

A couple from the humorous side...