Michael Oakshott Quotes

History is the memory of things said and done.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

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

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

I think you can learn from history.

I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.

There are moments in history that people should be reminded of.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.