History

• "To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child." -- Cicero

• "It is a much more formidable and difficult task to relate a historical tragedy than to take part in it." -- Milovan Djilas

• "Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it." -- Oscar Wilde

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

• "History is not to be searched for practical lessons, the applicability of which will always be doubtful in view of the inexhaustible novelty of circumstances and combinations of causes, but just this, that the mind acquire a sensitiveness an imaginative range."-- Peter Geyl

• "Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -- Alfred Whitney Griswold

• "History is not a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches." -- Lord Acton

• "Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty’s lamp guiding your steps and opportunity’s arm steadying your way." -- Ronald Reagan

• "History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap." -- Ronald Reagan

• "He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past." -- George Orwell

• "History always has been and always will be regularly rewritten, in response to new questions, new information, new methodologies, and new political, social, and cultural imperatives." -- Eric Foner

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

• "Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it." Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

• "History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past." James McPherson

• "It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people." -- Good Omens (by Gaiman & Pratchett )