Carroll Quigley Quotes

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

To think historically is almost the same thing now as if in all ages history had been made according to theory.

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

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.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

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

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

While we read history we make history.

The way you 'take history' is also a way of 'making history.'

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

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.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

I write to learn the flow of history.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

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

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.