Obituarium: Farewell, my man!

...it's been a hell of a ride.

Paul Newman
Jan. 26, 1925 - Sep. 26, 2008
---------------------------------- requiescat in pace, Paul. ----------

My Favorite Words 21: That's History!

There is more truth in the silliest romance than in the most elevated history.

Charles Palliser
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History never repeats itself, man always does.

Voltaire
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History, n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.

Ambroise Bierce
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History is a bucket of ashes.

Carl Sandburg
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The sum total of history is all the things they aren't telling us.

Don DeLillo
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History would be a wonderful thing--if it were only true.

Leo Tolstoy
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History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

James Joyce
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History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.

Clarence Darrow
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On the whole, history tends to be rather poor fiction--except at its best.

Gore Vidal
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We learn from history that we do not learn from History.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel
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History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte
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History shall not dare say anything false

Cicero
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History is bunk.

Henry Ford
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History is different from personal retrospection. The latter is individual, subjective, private, in many ways untestable: Its realm is memory. History, on the other hand, is social. It is public. Through debate, appeals to data, judgments about coherence and plausibility, history is in some sense testable. It is in its obligations to both evidence and testability that history as a discipline is scientific. Its relation to memory is thus different from that which memory shares with personal recollection, because history's realm is shared, public knowledge.

Paula Frediksen
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In history nothing happens too early or too late, nothing that has happened could have not, and nothing that has not happened could have been made happen. History only is, and it is so at its own time which is always the right one.

Hugo Pezzini
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If autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

Barbara Tuchman
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People think of history in the long term, but history, in fact, is a very sudden thing.

Philip Roth
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