George S. Patton Quotes

You learn history in school, and you have a reverential feeling toward it. But by being irreverent, it feels current.

I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

Of course history is easily manipulated - though that makes it even more important for us to know what actually happened.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

History, in [Nietzsche's] view, belongs to him who is fighting a great fight, and who needs examples, teachers and comforters, but cannot find them among his contemporaries. Without history the mountain chain of great men's great moments, which runs through millennia, could not stand clearly and vividly before me.

One has to learn from history. Quite frankly, it is almost impossible to have a sense of vision without a sense of history. If history is learned, then it doesn't have to repeat itself over generations.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

The best benefit we derive from history is the enthusiasm it excites.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

We make a mistake to condescend to the past as if it were preparatory to our own time.

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

Historians are dangerous people. They are capable of upsetting everything.

The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

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

History after all is the true poetry.

I'm a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel.