Historical Analysis Quotes

Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

I am guiding you to seek truth from the facts of the historical conditions of our society and to identify the problems. The correct solutions will come with the correct identification of the problems.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

Study the past if you would define the future. --CONFUCIUS

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated "the lesson of history.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

One of the most admirable things about history is, that almost as a rule we get as much information out of what it does not say as we get out of what it does say.… history consists of two equal parts; one of these halves is statements of fact, the other half is inference, drawn from the facts. To the experienced student of history there are no difficulties about this; to him the half which is unwritten is as clearly and surely visible, by the help of scientific inference, as if it flashed and flamed in letters of fire before his eyes. When the practiced eye of the simple peasant sees the half of a frog projecting above the water, he unerringly infers the half of the frog which he does not see. To the expert student in our great science, history is a frog; half of it is submerged, but he knows it is there, and he knows the shape of it.

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

History is not only the record of the past, but also the discipline of investigating and interpreting the past. The study of history develops habits of critical thinking and effective writing, as well as cultivates the careful analysis of various types of quantitative and qualitative evidence.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.