Donald Kagan Quotes

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

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.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

So often when we historicize material, we use this big wide-angle lens.

Well goodness knows, goodness knows what historians will write.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

We knew in our gut that History needed to be more than a timeline.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.