What is History?

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero

"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy

"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton

"The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E. H. Carr

"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Turner