Famous quotes by Historians

Historians

Historians illuminate how societies remember, forget, and transform. Their reflections reveal methods, doubts, and discoveries that turn scattered evidence into narratives about power, culture, and everyday life. These quotes span eras and traditions, inviting quiet curiosity as well as spirited debate. Students, educators, and lifelong learners alike may find perspective in these concise insights, which balance skepticism with wonder. Together, these voices show how engaging the past clarifies the present and opens fresh questions about what knowledge, justice, and change can mean.

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks"

Lord Acton, Historian

Small: Lord Acton

"The family is the nucleus of civilization"

Will Durant, Historian

Small: Will Durant

"There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behaves any of us to find fault with the rest of us"

James Truslow Adams, Historian

"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder"

Arnold J. Toynbee, Historian

Small: Arnold J. Toynbee

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money"

Alexis de Tocqueville, Historian

"If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it"

Johan Huizinga, Historian

"Books are humanity in print"

Barbara Tuchman, Historian

"We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone"

James Anthony Froude, Historian

"Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos"

Will Durant, Historian

Small: Will Durant

"Personality is lower than partiality"

Goldwin Smith, Historian

"Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile"

Henry B. Adams, Historian

"History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us"

Johan Huizinga, Historian

"The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators"

Thomas B. Macaulay, Historian

"The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us"

Michel Foucault, Historian

"Education is the transmission of civilization"

Will Durant, Historian

Small: Will Durant

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"

Tacitus, Historian

Small: Tacitus

"Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity"

William Manchester, Historian

"The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections"

Lord Acton, Historian

Small: Lord Acton

"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous"

Edward Gibbon, Historian

"Of all possessions a friend is the most precious"

Herodotus, Historian

Small: Herodotus

"As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind"

Cleveland Amory, Historian

"Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now"

Arnold J. Toynbee, Historian

Small: Arnold J. Toynbee

"Expenditures rise to meet income"

C. Northcote Parkinson, Historian

"Better a bad excuse, than none at all"

William Camden, Historian

"A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die"

Bernard Berenson, Historian

Small: Bernard Berenson

"Fear is the parent of cruelty"

James Anthony Froude, Historian

"History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"

Edward Gibbon, Historian

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil"

Hannah Arendt, Historian

"Every man is the architect of his own fortune"

Sallust, Historian

Small: Sallust

"All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome"

Tacitus, Historian

Small: Tacitus

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