"History is not what you thought. It is what you remember. All other history defeats itself."

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"If a science of history were achieved, it would, like the science of celestial mechanics, make possible the calculable prediction of the future in history. "

"History is and should be a science ... History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies."

"The first foundations of all history are the recitals of the fathers to the children, transmitted afterward from one generation to another; at their origin, they are at the very most probable, when they do not shock common sense, and they lose one degree of probability in each generation."

"History is ... a dialogue between the present and the past.

"when it is dark enough you can see the stars."

"History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play on the dead."

"History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead."