George Bernard Shaw said, we learn from history, that we learn nothing from history. I am sure that is a quote that you must have heard – even used – at one time or another. Here are a few more quotes about history that tell us that there is more to history than what the books say.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Robert F. Kennedy

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
Karl Marx

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.
Matthew Arnold

Well behaved women rarely make history.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics.
Ernst Troeltsch

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
Aristotle

Any time gone by was better.
Jorge Manrique

A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it.
Malcolm Cowley

He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!
Gottfried Benn

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban

The world is too dangerous to live in – not because of the people who do evil but because of the people who sit and let it happen.
Albert Einstein

History is the record of encounters between character and circumstance.
Donald Creighton

Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.
S?ren Kierkegaard

History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.
Anonymous