History is a sequence of random events and unpredictable choices, which is why the future is so difficult to foresee.

Recent history takes a while to set. People really don’t know what just happened. They only figure it out later.

Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

So hard is it to discover the truth, because the history of past ages is rendered difficult by the lapse of time; while in contemporary history the truth is always obscured, either by private spite and hatred, or by a desire to curry favour with the chief men of the time.

There is little warrant for the belief that we know the laws of history well enough to make projections of any great reliability. Most of the turning points of history, great and small, were surprises to both their participants and the analysts of the day, whatever their doctrine.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

This is the trouble with history, though. Even if you were there, which I obviously was, it's sometimes very difficult to pin down.

It must be recognized that the real truths of history are hard to discover. Happily, for the most part, they are rather matters of curiosity than of real importance.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God — who knows all that can be known — seems powerless to change.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.

It is hard to think away out of our heads a history which has long lain in a remote past but which once lay in the future.

Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?

Humans sometimes make surprising choices, and human history is full of uncertainties.