History - christiansquoting.org.uk

History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressures of the air we breathe. Lord Acton (Cited in Eerdmans Handbook to the History of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), p. 2.

There is a hidden double standard. The past can be relativized simply by explaining the misconceptions of the ancient worldview. The present, however, remains strangely immune from relativization...In other words, the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the contemporary analyst take the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing. The electricity- and radio-users are placed intellectually above the Apostle Paul. PETER BERGER

Legend remains victorious in spite of history.-- Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) In "The Speaker's Electronic Reference Collection," AApex Software, 1994.

History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villa abandoned by a bankrupt builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.
G K Chesterton {What's Wrong With the World, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1910, p. 53}

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29 of May 1874 on Campden Hill, Kensington.
G. K. Chesterton, _Autobiography_

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it...Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. G. K. CHESTERTON, Orthodoxy

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

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. -- Winston Churchill

Not to know what has transacted in former times is to continue always a child. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Our history is not our destiny.... Alan Cohen, Wake-Up Calls: You Don't Have to Sleepwalk Through Your Life, Love, or Career! by Eric Allenbaugh

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. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge Table Talk 1835

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.-- Will Durant

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable."-John W. Gardner

The Past is past. Learn from it. Grow because of it. Mature in spite of it.--Jim Hamilton

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - Leslie. Poles Hartley (1895 &endash; 1972)

By despising all that has preceded us, we teach others to despise ourselves. -- William Hazlitt, 'On Reading Old Books', 1821

What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. --Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel, (1770-1831) _Philosophy of History_, Introduction.

The most important thing we can learn from the past is that no earlier civilization has survived. And the larger the pyramids and temples and statues they build in honor of their god or themselves, the harder has been the fall. Most of them have been so completely eradicated that it has taken archaeologists to bring them to light again. -- Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian archeologist.

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 Huxley, Aldous Leonard

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.... Aldous Huxley, "The Devils of Loudun"

Nothing changes more consistently than the past;...the past that influencesour lives is not what actually happened but what we believe happened. - Gerald W. Johnson

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.
Paul Johnson The Quotable Paul Johnson: A Topical Compilation of His Wit, Wisdom and Satire, edited by George J. Marlin, et al (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 138.

Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions. - Samuel Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare form which I am trying to wake. - James Joyce, Ulysses

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) "The End of Laissez-Faire," ch. 1, 1926.

Man is fatally slow on the uptake; it always takes him until the next generation to understand what's going on. ~Stanislaw Lec (1909-1966)

Ours is an inheritance that has stood the test of time. If it is to stand the test of the future, it needs to be celebrated and taught in the media, in academe and in our schools. I wonder how many children are taught that Britain was the first nation to abolish the slave trade &endash; and that for much of the nineteenth century the prime duty of the Royal Navy was to stop the slave trade of other nations?
I fear that, at present, it has become fashionable not to speak of such things. I fear it is more likely that our children will be shown the low points of our history than the high. It is more likely that they will take away a sense of shame, than of pride. Oliver Letwin MP E pluribus unum - agreeing to differ http://www.conservatives.com/news/article.cfm?obj_id=58240

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.- Malcolm X (1925-1965) "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," 1965

Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they must necessarily have the same results. -Niccolo Machiavelli

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present. Golda Meir

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world.-- Ludwig von Mises

We live in narrative, we live in story. Existence has a story shape to it. We have a beginning and an end, we have a plot, we have characters. EUGENE PETERSON

I have heard professing Christians of our own day speak as though the historicity of the Gospels does not matter -- all that matters is the contemporary Spirit of Christ. I contend that the historicity does matter, and I do not see why we, who live nearly two thousand years later, should call into question an Event for which there were many eye-witnesses still living at the time when most of the New Testament was written. It was no "cunningly devised fable" but an historic irruption of God into human history which gave birth to a young church so sturdy that the pagan world could not stifle or destroy it.
J. B. Phillips, Ring of Truth [1967]

A land without ruins is a land without memories--a land without memories is a land without history. --Abram Joseph Ryan

Chapter 62.A Bad Thing.
America was thus clearly top nation , and History came to a .
W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman , Final wordsof "1066 and All That" (explanatory note: "." is pronounced, full stop, not , period.)

History repeats itself, though less often than historians. --Richard Norton Smith, "Our Literary Leaders", _The Weekly Standard_, Mar 28, 2005

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.- Benedict Spinoza(1632-1677) In "The Speaker's Electronic Reference Collection," AApex Software, 1994.

History repeats itself
has to
nobody listens
Steve Turner

Christian history looks glorious in retrospect; but it is made up of constant hard choices and unattractive tasks, accepted under the pressure of the Will of God. Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941)

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.--- Israel Zangwill