Jonathan D. Horn Quotes

History is only very rarely the story of inevitabilities,” he says, “and it almost never appears in that form to its participants.

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

There are no inevitabilities in history

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

We must be proud of not being needles and threads in the hands of fate as it sews the motley cloth of history.... We know that this cloth is not sewn without us.... And that is not all. We can change the pattern of the carpet.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Historians emphasize contingency, complexity, and the unanticipated ... Few principles apply all the time.

The future is fluid. Each act, each decision, and each development creates new possibilities and eliminates others. The future is ours to direct.

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Before you leave, the fortune teller reminds you that the future is never set in stone.

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.

History shows you don't know what the future brings.

History is full of times when the inevitable front-runner is inevitable right up until he or she is no longer inevitable.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

From Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln to FDR to Reagan, every great president inspires enormous affection and enormous hostility. We'll all be much saner, I think, if we remember that history is full of surprises and things that seemed absolutely certain one day are often unimaginable the next.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

You can never plan the future by the past.

The future ain't what it used to be.

History does not repeat itself. Nor does it unfold in cycles. The real future is contingent, rich beyond imagining, a perennial gobsmack, tragic and glorious in equal measure; the pundits' future, spun of 'conventional wisdom,' is only a sucker punch to that common-sense fact.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is the willingness to think.

It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.