If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Benjamin Disraeli

The dead hand has too long hampered the freedom of the living.

James Robertson

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

Walter Raleigh

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Alexis de Tocqueville

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Jessamyn West

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

George Santayana

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

A. Whitney Brown

Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.

Lynn White, Jr.

Whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones,Whose table earth, whose dice were human bones.

George Gordon

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.

Bill Vaughan

What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

Voltaire

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

Philip Wylie

For me there is no greater subject than history. How a man can study it and not be forced to become a philosopher, I cannot tell.

George E. Wilson

The obscurest epoch is today.

Robert Louis Stevenson