All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice-their choice.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought-two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement.

There is no history; only biography.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

Historians relate not so much what is done as what they would have believed.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.