If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!—Coleridge.
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.—Gibbon.
We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy of history, is conjecture.—Johnson.
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.—Joubert.
To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not only difficult,—it is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach least to agreement.—Froude.
The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror which merely reflects objects, but of the judge who sees, listens, and decides.—Lamartine.
In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth.—Macaulay.
History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.—Washington Irving.
History has its foreground and its background, and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon, and a general idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.—Macaulay.
Violent natures make history. The instruments they use almost always kill. Religion and philosophy have their vestments covered with innocent blood.—X. Doudan.