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

 —John W. Gardner

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

 —Voltaire

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

 —Napoleon Bonaparte

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

 —Winston Churchill

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

 —African proverb

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.

 —James Baldwin

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all; the conscientious historian will correct these defects.                                                                            —Herodotus

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

 —Charles Angoff

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

 —Konrad Adenauer

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

—Will and Ariel Durant

A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents.

 —Richard Reeves

History is never antiquated because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

 —Walter Rauschenbusch

It is human nature that repeats itself, not history.

 —John Tolland

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

—Rebecca West

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

 —George Santayana