Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Quote Garden: History Bumper Crop!

"Pricklefoot" (gotta be a great story there, but the linked blog is missing. Another story?) in comments points to The Quote Garden as another source for pithy wisdom. Their history page, linked above, is quite extensive, and includes quite a few quotations I don't have in my collection. Here's a few highlights, and, as always, emphasis is my own:
  • The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. ~John Still, The Jungle Tide
  • All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon. ~Voltaire, Jeannot et Colin
  • We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre. ~Dick Gregory
  • We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? ~Robert Penn Warren, Segregation
  • History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. ~Konrad Adenauer
  • History is a vast early warning system. ~Norman Cousins
  • Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. ~H.L. Mencken
  • Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. ~Will and Ariel Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
  • If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. ~Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary

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