“No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”
“There's a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.”
“The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.”
“What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.”
“History is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed.”
“Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
Not who you're looking for? Others named History: past events and their documentation, studied through histori · US-based international satellite and cable TV channel · song by English rock band The Verve · novel by Italian author Elsa Morante