History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity².

Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC), Pro¹ Publio Sestio

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies³ and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon (1737 - 1794)

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned⁴ to repeat it.

George Santayana (1863 - 1952), The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe⁵.

H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946), The Outline of History, vol.2, chapter 41, 1921

History is more or less bunk⁶. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.

Henry Ford⁷ (1863 - 1947), Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25th, 1916

For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum.

J. W. Schopf

That is the supreme⁸ value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.

John Buchan, Baron⁹ Tweedsmuir

I thought about how wonderfully strange it would be to live in a place where almost everything had been built by the dead.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner (1912 - 2002), quoted by Bill Moyers

If you write a post and put it on a blog, that's a historical document. If you change your template, then that entry looks completely different. It's the same words, but not the same meaning. This all depends on what historical questions that people will be asking and we can't know what they will want.

Josh Greenberg, Digital Preservation¹⁰ and Blogs, SXSW 2006

History is the short trudge¹¹ from Adam to atom.

Leonard Louis Levinson

History is the version of past events that people have decided¹² to agree upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)

Some people make headlines while others make history.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in Time Magazine

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

Want of foresight¹³, unwillingness¹⁴ to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong-these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965), Speech, House of Commons, May 2, 1935

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau¹⁵ of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)