Henry David Thoreau History Quotations

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.

A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.

There is no history of how bad became better.

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

Some creatures are made to see in the dark.

History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning ofthings, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,--when did burdock and plantain sprout first?

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology.

We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.

All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Going from--toward; it is the history of every one of us.