H. G. Wells Quotes

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it.

The only reason to keep talking about history is if you are juxtaposing it with the world that we live in today, if you are learning something about our world by looking at the way they shaped their world.

It is especially difficult for modern people to conceive that our modern, scientific age might not be an improvement over the prescientific period.

Western Civilization has been in a state of decline since the Edwardian age, say 1910. That was the height of Greco-Roman European civilization. Then there was the First World War. That was the beginning of the end. That civilization has been in a decline ever since. But from the American triumphalist point of view our wonderful electronic revolution is really the forefront of an ongoing wonderful civilization.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

Each generation confronts new problems, encounters new facts, and tells our history somewhat differently.

People always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and they underestimate how much will change over the next 10 years.

History is an instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

Almost anybody from the past will hold views discordant with the present.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.

I think a lot of times, the historical piece is often a way to comment on the present.

I love and I'm intrigued by what history does to people and to subjects that matter.

Our interest in history always reflects our own times.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

So when people say how horrible it is that Donald Trump is president, well, yeah, but we've faced a lot worse than this and our country went on to go from the world of 'Mad Men' to the world it is today, and that's what's going to happen now. That's what's going to happen in the next 50 years. We're going to be fine.

There's substance to the point that sociological information is new. We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more.

It's not just modern-day society that is liberal.

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.