History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

History is too important to be left in the past.

...ordinary people are the ones who determine the outcome of human events in the end - not kings and princes, not masters and tyrants.  It is laborers and workmen, cousins and acquaintances that upend the expectations of the brilliant and the glamorous, the expert and the meticulous.  It is plain folks, simple people, who literally change the course of history - because they are the stuff or which history is made.  They are the ones who make the world go round.

The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge.

If you can cut the people off from their history, then they can be easily persuaded.

Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.

The books we read help to shape who we are. Reading offers us, as children, our first independence- allowing us to travel far beyond the confines of our immediate world. Books introduce us to great figures in history, narratives that stir our spirit, fictions that tug us out of ourselves and into the lives of a thousand others, and visions of every era through which human beings have lived. And in the process of stretching who we are, books also connect us to all others- of our own or previous times- who have read what we've read. In the community of readers, we instantly become linked to those who share our love for specific characters or passages.

A well-composed book,' says Caroline Gordon, 'is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.'

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.