“History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

“A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself.”

“History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

“History is the study of the world’s crime.”

“History never repeats itself. Man always does.”

“Rewrite history. Redefine the position.”

“doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.” 

“Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”

“What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history”

“Do not read history. Read biography for it is life without theory.”

“There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.”

“Sometimes - history needs a push.” 

“The revolution does not need historians.” 

“at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to—rather than alleviate—material and cultural deficit. If” 

“History doesn’t go in a straight line... Over time there’s a kind of a general trajectory towards a more just society, with regressions and reversals of course.” 

“If you look at history, even recent history, you see that there is indeed progress. . . . Over time, the cycle is clearly, generally upwards. And it doesn't happen by laws of nature. And it doesn't happen by social laws. . . . It happens as a result of hard work by dedicated people who are willing to look at problems honestly, to look at them without illusions, and to go to work chipping away at them, with no guarantee of success — in fact, with a need for a rather high tolerance for failure along the way, and plenty of disappointments.” 

“the main thing is to make history not to write it” 

“The main thing is to make history, not to write it”