How History Is Written Quotes

#1. One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.

Salman Rushdie

#2. History is a story written by the finger of God.

C.S. Lewis

#3. I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.

C.L.R. James

#4. There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged.

Howard Zinn

#5. There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.

Gloria Naylor

#6. If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.

Eoin Colfer

#7. History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#8. When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.

John Shelby Spong

#9. History books are being re-written all the time

Andy Warhol

#10. History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasize. Only death is certain.

"To Die for One's Country is Glorious," p. 131

Danilo Kis

#11. Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Jill Lepore

#12. In reality, orthodoxy comes into being only after there are choices to be made, with competing, and mutually exclusive, options. Heresy is the choice that loses. Ecclesiastical history, like any other, is written by the victors.

Eric A. Eliason

#13. For history is written by victors. They can write it however they want. The losers are always remembered the way the victors portray them.

Amish Tripathi

#14. History is written by those who hang heroes.

Robert The Bruce

#15. Nobody really knows for sure how the Boxer Rebellion started. It began among the poor, and the history of the poor is rarely written down.

Gene Luen Yang

#16. History is written by the victor, and if the elderly don't pass down their memories, eventually there won't be anyone else left alive who knows how the war was really fought.

Rachel Vincent

#17. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Karl Marx

#18. The power that comes from knowing the facts of history is dwarfed by the power that comes from being able to shape the stories about how that history is written and told.

Annie Leonard

#19. Those are the bad guys, right?"
"Depends on who wins, I guess.

Shannon A. Thompson

#20. The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare - all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

Joseph A. Schumpeter

#21. If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Black Elk

#22. What are we if we are not products of our history? History is not in our past but forms us in the present. And how histories are written or interpreted depends on what we do today.

H.O. Charles

#23. The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence.

John Keegan

#24. History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.

Margaret MacMillan

#25. ...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.

Mario Puzo

#26. History is written by the victors,' she said, 'but the truth has a way of revealing itself.

Sebastien De Castell

#27. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Alfred North Whitehead

#28. I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.

Adam Hochschild

#29. Islamic history is written in two types of ink. Black for the ink of the scholars and red for the blood of the martyrs!

Me

#30. When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.

William Howard Taft

#31. Sometimes people have too much history together, history of the wrong kind, and people cannot tear pages from the book of their life. Once something is written there it is permanent.

Ryan David Jahn

#32. Be suspicious of history that is written by the conquerors.

Jack Gantos

#33. The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.

Augustus William Hare

#34. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.

Orson Scott Card

#35. Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons.

Cathleen Schine

#36. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!

Jack London

#37. If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

Samuel Johnson

#38. History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.

Sam Maggs

#39. The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.

Rick Strassman

#40. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.

Victor Hugo

#41. Histories of morality are rarely written in order to inform the reader.

John Gray

#42. I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot.

Lev Grossman

#43. I'd been assured, at age 21 or so, by a well-known editor who saw the first part of The Secret History in what was basically its final form, that it would never be published because "no woman has ever written a successful novel from a male point of view."

Donna Tartt

#44. History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

Dan Brown

#45. Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons

#46. History is, as we know, written by the winners.

Rachel Martin