unpredictable nature of history Quotes

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?

As for me, the grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream.

I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

Politics deals with a common-sense approach to the imponderables of history, that I think are obscured by a certain kind of rationalism.