Quotes on History
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32. History
"Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent. He has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring, will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary."
Boswell: Life
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119. History
"We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles were fought, we can depend on as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture."
Boswell: Life
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394. History; Life
"It seems to be almost the universal errour of historians to suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effect has a proportionate cause. In the inanimate action of matter upon matter, the motion produced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always that there is a strong reason for a great event. Obstinacy and flexibility, malignity and kindness, give place, alternately, to each other; and the reason of these vicissitudes, however important may be the consequences, often escapes the mind in which the change is made."
Johnson: Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands
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472. History; Knowledge
"To know anything ... we must know its effects; to see men we must see their works that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present, we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is, that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief the past is the object, and the future hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect."
Johnson: Rasselas [Imlac]
Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas.
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473. History
"The present state of things is the consequence of the former, and it is natural to enquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or the evil that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent: if we are intrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may be properly charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it."
Johnson: Rasselas [Imlac]
Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas.
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554. History; Vanity
"The miscarriages of the great designs of princes are recorded in the histories of the world, but are of little use to the bulk of mankind, who seem very little interested in admonitions against errors which they cannot commit."
Johnson: Rambler #17 (May 15, 1750)
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685. History; Pleasure; Reading; Writing
"It is not easy for the most artful writer to give us an interest in happiness or misery, which we think ourselves never likely to feel, and with which we have never been acquainted. Histories of the downfalls of kingdoms and revolutions of empires are read with great tranquillity; the imperial tragedy pleases common auditors only by its pomp of ornaments and grandeur of ideas; and the man whose faculties have been engrossed by business, and whose heart never fluttered but at the rise or fall of the stocks, wonders how the attention can be seized or the affection agitated by a tale of love."
Johnson: Rambler #60 (October 13, 1750)
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687. History; Moral Instruction
"The general and rapid narratives of history, which involve a thousand fortunes in the business of a day, and complicate innumerable incidents in one great transaction, afford few lessons applicable to private life, which derives its comforts and its wretchedness from the right or wrong management of things, which nothing but their frequency makes considerable."
Johnson: Rambler #60 (October 13, 1750)
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740. History; Research/Study
"To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon inquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books or pamphlets not always at hand.
Johnson: Dryden (Lives of the Poets)
Note: The meaning of "adjust" which Johnson seems to mean is "To reduce to the true state or standard; to make accurate." (Def'n 2 in his dictionary)
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790. History
"It is impossible to read the different accounts of any great event, without a wish that truth had more power over partiality."
Johnson: Idler #20 (August 26, 1758)
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895. Deceit; History; Innocence
"Historians are certainly chargeable with the depravation of mankind, when they relate, without censure, those stratagems of war by which the virtues of an enemy are engaged to his destruction. A ship comes before a port, weather-beaten and shattered, and the crew implore the liberty of repairing their breaches, supplying themselves with necessaries, or burying their dead. The humanity of the inhabitants inclines them to consent, the strangers enter the town with weapons concealed, fall suddenly upon their benefactors, destroy those that make resistance, and become masters of the place; they return home rich with plunder, and their success is recorded to encourage imitation."
Johnson: Rambler #79 (December 18, 1750)
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984. History
"Characters should never be given by an historian, unless he knew the people whom he describes, or copies from those who knew them."
Boswell: Life of Johnson
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1,033. History; Perspective
"Those who have no power to judge of past times but by their own, should always doubt their conclusions."
Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets)
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1,154. History; Writing

"It is natural to believe ... that no writer has a more easy task than the historian. The philosopher has the works of omniscience to examine; and is therefore engaged in disquisitions, to which finite intellects are utterly unequal. The poet trusts to his invention, and is not only in danger of those inconsistencies to which every one is exposed by departure from truth, but may be censured as well for deficiencies of matter as for irregularity of disposition, or impropriety of ornament. But the happy historian has no other labour than of gathering what tradition pours down upon him, or records treasure for his use. He has only the actions and design of men like himself to conceive and to relate; he is not to form, but copy characters, and therefore is not blamed for the inconsistency of statesmen, the injustice of tyrants, or the cowardice of commanders. The difficulty of making variety consistent, or uniting probability with surprise, needs not to disturb him; the manners and actions of personages are already fixed; his materials are provided and put into his hands, and he is at leisure to employ all his powers in arranging and displaying them. Yet, even with these advantages, very few in any age have been able to raise themselves to reputation by writing histories..."
Johnson: Rambler #122 (May 18, 1751)
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1,155. History
"Among the innumerable authours who fill every nation with accounts of their ancestors, or undertake to transmit to futurity the events of their own time, the greater part, when fashion and novelty have ceased to recommend them, are of no other use than chronological memorials, which necessity may sometimes require to be consulted, but which fright away curiosity, and disgust delicacy."
Johnson: Rambler #122 (May 18, 1751)
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1,310. Curiosity; History
"It is not easy to discover how it concerns him that gathers the produce, or receives the rent of an estate, to know through what families the land has passed, who is registered in the Conqueror's survey as its possessor, how often it has been forfeited by treason, or how often sold by prodigality. The power or wealth of the present inhabitants of a country cannot be much increased by an inquiry after the names of those barbarians who destroyed one another twenty centuries ago, in contests for the shelter of woods or convenience of pasturage. Yet we see no man can be at rest in the enjoyment of a new purchase till he has learned the history of his grounds from the ancient inhabitants of the parish, and that no nation omits to record the actions of their ancestors, however bloody, savage, and rapacious."
Johnson: Rambler #161 (October 1, 1751)
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1,759. Biography; History
"He that records transactions in which himself was engaged, has not only an opportunity of knowing innumerable particulars which escape spectators, but has his natural powers exalted by that ardour which always rises at the remembrance of our own importance, and by which every man is enabled to relate his own actions better than another's."
Johnson: Idler #65 (July 14, 1759)
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1,760. History; Writing
"There are some works which the authors must consign unpublished to posterity, however uncertain be the event, however hopeless be the trust. He that writes the history of his own times, if he adhere steadily to truth, will write that which his own times will not easily endure. He must be content to reposite his book till all private passions shall cease, and love and hatred give way to curiosity."
Johnson: Idler #65 (July 14, 1759)
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