If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
History is more interesting than most people think.
You can't change what happened.
You look back and you remember the good, the bad and the ugly.
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.
History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy.
Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.
History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity
But everyone's an expert with the virtue of hindsight . . . .
…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.
Yesterday is history Tomorrow's a mystery
History is the story of events, with praise or blame.
Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.
Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.
The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.
What happens today can affect what happens tomorrow, but it cannot affect what happened yesterday.
Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.
Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
History is the greatest of dialecticians.
Opposition to the Bolsheviks
History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
