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History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
"We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it."
I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
"History is a vast early warning system."
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians.
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
"History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside."
"The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place... but their past is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country, it is assimilated in ourselves and resurrected in an ever-changing present."
History is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid.
Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in historia, et omne, quod fuit in historia, deberet esse in intellectu. - "Nothing is in intellect which has not been in history, and everything that was in history should also be in intellect."
"It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away."
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."
History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity.
"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement, but its other face is human defeat.
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