Circumstances Quote by Penelope Lively

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

— Henry Adams

“History fancies itself linear - but yields to a cyclical temptation.”

— Criss Jami

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

— Han Suyin

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

— Joseph J. Ellis

Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.

— Barack Obama

In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

— Oliver Stone

History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and…

— Voltaire

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

— Julian Jaynes

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.

— Rita Dove

“Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops, forever a-spin... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating. History is not…

— Thomas Pynchon

History is the product of vast, amorphous and indecipherable social movements.

— Leo Tolstoy