Noam Chomsky - Leo Tolstoy - Roger Ebert - Bernard Williams - Philip Zelikow - Robert Kennedy - Horizon TV - The Day the Earth was Born TV - Karl Marx - George Eliot - Gerda Lerner - Jacob Bronowski TV - Stephen Fry - H G Wells - Napoleon Bonaparte - Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle - Howard Jacobson TV - Rageh Omaar TV - Troy 2004 - Red Dwarf TV - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Shelby Foote - Bettany Hughes TV - E A Freeman - Henry James - George Orwell - Proverbs - Edward Gibbon - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Emile M Cioran - James Burke TV - Bob Marley - Friedrich Nietzsche - Eamon de Valera - James Joyce - William Faulkner - Jakob Ruchti - Voltaire - Ezra Pound - T S Eliot - Dilys Powell - G W F Hegel - Francis Fukuyama - J R Seeley - Tim Robbins - Samuel Johnson - Nelson Mandela - W H Auden - Karl Popper - Peter Ackroyd - H A L Fisher - Henry Ford - Philip Guedalla - Arthur M Schlesinger - Augustine Birrell - Dionysius - Samuel Butler - Thomas Carlyle - Winston Churchill - Fidel Castro - Oscar Wilde - Enoch Powell - W C Sellar & R J Yeatman - J T Fraser - Mike Leigh - Richard D Hall & Wilson & Blackett TV - Andrew Marr TV - Dana Arnold - Lord Byron - John Maynard Keynes - George F Kennan - Henry Fielding - Philip Roth - Terry Venables - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Reputations TV - The Corbett Report - Michael Wood TV - Alex Ferguson - History's Greatest Myths TV -
History does not come neatly packaged into distinct periods, but by imposing such a structure upon it, we can sometimes gain clarity without doing too much violence to the facts. Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy introduction
History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true. Leo Tolstoy
The blood is on so many hands that history will weep in the telling. Roger Ebert, cited Life Itself, 2014
Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly ‘objective’ historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biases that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some ‘deconstructive’ histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness 2002
A further turn is to be found in some ‘unmasking’ accounts of natural science, which aim to show that its pretensions to deliver the truth are unfounded, because of social forces that control its activities. Unlike the case of history, these do not use truths of the same kind; they do not apply science to the criticism of science. They apply the social sciences, and typically depend on the remarkable assumption that the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver truth about science than science is to deliver truth about the world. ibid.
Contemporary history is defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public’s presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of public presumption is akin to the notion of public myth, but without the negative connotation of the word myth.
Such presumptions are beliefs thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with any real certainty) and shared with the relevant political community. Philip Z Zelikow, thesis on Social Conditioning, co-producer 9/11 Commission Report
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Robert Kennedy
I believe that the Apollo moon landings were the greatest achievements in human history. Brian Cox, Moon: The Horizon Guide, BBC 2009
Imagine if our planet’s eventful history was compressed into the twenty-four hours of a single day. At midnight the infant Earth was born ... At sixteen minutes past midnight a cataclysmic collision created our moon ... Then just before one o’clock in the morning the scene was set for ... the origin of life ... It took more than seven hours for all the iron to be removed from the oceans till one p.m. in the afternoon ... Over the next eight hours the microbes raised the level of oxygen ... It took only the last three hours of our twenty-four day for all the other life-forms on our planet to evolve. The first multi-cellular life emerged at six minutes past nine in the evening. The first fish at twenty-two minutes past nine ... By ten to eleven in the evening dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The first primates appeared at twenty to midnight. And with just thirty seconds to go, the first humans made their appearance. Tiny microbes had ruled the planet for over three billion years – two-thirds of the history of the Earth. The Day the Earth was Born, 2014
Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgets to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Karl Marx
4History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends. Karl Marx, The Holy Family ch6
History does nothing. It does not possess immense riches. It does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. Karl Marx
The happiest woman, like the happiest nations, have no history. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Women have been left out of history not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or male historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-centred terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked questions of history which are inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to light up areas of historical darkness we must, for a time, focus on a woman-centred inquiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women’s past. This is the primary task of women’s history. The central question it raises is: What would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define? Gerda Lerner, The Challenge of Women’s History
The Bible is a curious history: part folklore and part record. History is of course written by the victors. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 2/13: The Harvest of the Seasons, BBC 1973
The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o’ the wisp, the Jack o’lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There’s no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can’t help wondering if it’s a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen. Stephen Fry, Making History
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. H G Wells
Scepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy. Napoleon Bonaparte
Everything on Earth is soon forgotten except the opinion we leave imprinted on history. There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men. Napoleon Bonaparte
There are no ancient histories other than these fables. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte including the version, ‘History is a lie agreed upon’