People, human beings with all their creative diversity, are the makers of history.

Peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.

Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

The mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved in a tornado.

The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.

The middle sort of historians, of which the most part are, they spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

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