Quotes About Written History

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Three million years! The infinitely crowded panorama of written history, with its empires and its kings, its triumphs and its tragedies, covered barely one thousandth of this appalling span of time.

Arthur C. Clarke

#5. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.

Lloyd DeMause

#6. For every written history, there is a silenced part of it, that is left to remain untold and undiscovered until history repeats itself.

Joon Mier Da Mienta

#7. I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Saul Williams

#8. Here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#9. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) ...

John Ashbery

#10. No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

Gloria Steinem

#11. For thousands of years, men have written history, so it seems to me that most of what we've read is from the male point of view.

Stacy Schiff

#12. My whole written history is one big lie! I mean, I can't even believe my history.

Dennis Hopper

#13. We did it. Make no mistake: We have written history. Today there's a change of guards in Denmark.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt

#14. 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

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

Mario Puzo

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

Sebastien De Castell

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

Alfred North Whitehead

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Jack Gantos

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Margaret MacMillan

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

Samuel Johnson

#27. 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

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

Victor Hugo

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

John Gray

#30. History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.

Mario Van Peebles

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Rachel Martin

#36. 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

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

C.S. Lewis

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

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

Eoin Colfer

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

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#43. 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

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

Andy Warhol

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

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

Robert The Bruce

#50. If things continue like this, the history of our age may one day be written under a caliphate's supervision .

David Selbourne

#51. That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.

Kate Atkinson

#52. History is written by the winners

Daniel Handler

#53. The melody of her life is played just as it was written. Mary was thought, conceived, and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realization.

Fulton J. Sheen

#54. All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

Tacitus

#55. History is written by the victor.

Guillermo Del Toro

#56. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

Waylon Jennings

#57. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

Albert Camus

#58. So she [Eleanor Roosevelt] is an amazing First Lady. What other First Lady in U.S. history has ever written a book to criticize her husband's policies?

Blanche Wiesen Cook

#59. The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick

#60. I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this.

Josh Radnor

#61. A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

Antonin Scalia

#62. History is written by the victors, the strongest, the most determined. Truth is found most often in the silence, in the quiet places.

Kate Mosse

#63. The Labor Party has always - always been praised as leaders. In fact, there's probably more books written about ALP leaders and the ALP people than the Libs or anyone else in Australian's history, but there was substance to it.

Warren Mundine

#64. I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

Kate Williams

#65. I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.

Santosh Kalwar

#66. What will happen to those who stone the prophets and persecute the masters? His fate is written in flaming letters on each page of the history.

Frank Harris

#67. History is written by the victors
and when there is no victors, it all winds up in the corporate shredders.

Neal Shusterman

#68. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.

Emma Goldman

#69. History is written by victors," said Duko. "But I have little use for history. It is the future with which I am concerned.

Raymond E. Feist

#70. A History of Economic Doctrines" - written by Gide and Rist

M.L. Jhingan

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

Eoin Colfer

#72. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#73. 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

#74. When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

C.L.R. James

#75. The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

Max Lerner

#76. It was being written in the East that 'Sufism was formerly a reality without a name: now it is a name without a reality'.

Idries Shah

#77. But don't forget my ideas are only what's been written down in history by the great people of the world who've gone before. All I've done is condense the wisdom of the world into an attitude for athletics. Athletics aren't just running, it's a way of life

Percy Cerutty

#78. A nation that fails to plan intelligently for the development and protection of its precious waters will be condemned to wither because of its shortsightedness. The hard lessons of history are clear, written on the deserted sands and ruins of once proud civilizations.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#79. But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.

Preston Brooks

#80. Songs are often written by people who are witnesses to history,

George Nethercutt

#81. I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

Joyce Carol Oates

#82. There is no doubt in my mind when history was written, the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world.

George W. Bush

#83. History is replete with blunders written by sycophants.

Tomichan Matheikal

#84. Doona always believe everything you read, especially history written by the conquerors of a nation, ...

Donna Grant

#85. But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

George Eliot

#86. Written with grace and thoroughly researched, One People, One Blood is an ethnography with a lot of heart that also sheds new light on a fascinating and fraught chapter in recent Jewish history.

Ruth Behar

#87. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.

Anna Quindlen

#88. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.

William Jones

#89. Wright and Cowen, who have separately written important scholarly works on the financial history of the early republic, here repackage their research for readers of popular history, and do so impressively.

David Liss

#90. The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.

Marvin Perry

#91. There are many ways to tell the history of the world. Oral histories that were later written down, including the Book of Genesis, the Rig Veda, and the Popul Vuh, focused especially on the actions of gods and on human/divine interactions. The

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

#92. They didn't have novels back then. (Tory) History says they didn't have books, yet what's this thing in my hand? It's square, bound paper that's been written on. Looks like a book to me. (Acheron) Thank you, Captain Sarcasm. How nice of you to join us again. (Tory)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#93. When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.

Erma Bombeck

#94. To pen a new history, one written in fire. And

Marcus Sakey

#95. You know, I'm the President during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.

George W. Bush

#96. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#97. We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.

William Hazlitt

#98. History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill

Ron Mayes

#99. Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.

Joseph J. Ellis

#100. You know the old saying: "History is written by the winners. And also, the team of hand-picked historians that the winner keeps hidden away in an underground bunker".

John Hodgman