Cormac McCarthy Quotes

It is supposed to true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and love of blood.

I don't know if a historian or scholar owns an opinion.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.

Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

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

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

History is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

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

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation. (82)

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy