Terry Pratchett Quotes

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

From my films, you can at least learn about Iran, you can get a sense of the history and the society. But no such films have been made about Afghanistan, so you really can't know much about it.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books, and the compilers of magazine articles and TV programs.

America has long been the land of immigrants.

It's a curious thing, this thing we call civilization...we think it is an affair of epochs, and nations. It's really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilized and the other a barbarian...All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

I am proud of Russia and I am sure that the vast majority of Russian citizens have great love and respect for their Motherland. We have much to be proud of: Russian culture and Russian history. We have every reason to believe in the future of our country. But we have no obsession that Russia must be a super power in the international arena. The only thing we do is protecting our vital interests.

There is one fact that can be established. The only phenomenon which, always and in all parts of the world, seems to be linked with the appearance of writing

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

The arts can enrich all of us in this nation as individuals. The arts can enrich all of our communities and the country. And the arts can connect us to each other like nothing else can.

Imagine if the United States, in its war against Hitler, had said to Stalin: we don't want your support until you make your country democratic.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

Culture is a product of law. And laws create norms for society. This is why anyone who wants to change the culture of a country must try to change the norms of the country.

My nation faces a fundamental challenge - survival. The regime is more threatened than ever before. My forefathers had it easy. The Great Leader, my grandfather, ruled with the support of the world's other superpower at the time, the Soviet Union, as well as our China. But today, the Soviet Union is history and China has become more integrated with the Western system. And the United States seeks regime change in my country. And yet, we have survived with our ideology and system intact. How? Because we have built a protection for ourselves in the form of nuclear weapons.

History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.

Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it.