One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously when the decay which leads its to death has already begun.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Gravity's Rainbow

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

Happiness and History

One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness. But actually history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.

John Leonard

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

Richard Ellman

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

The Devil's Dictionary

History: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Table-Talk

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.

A Certain World

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

The Dyer's Hand

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

The History of Herodotus

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

Good as Gold

History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil.

Notes of a Native Son

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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

African Proverb

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

Ulysses

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.