We cannot change the history of the past.

In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and in which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which one happens to disagree.

one of the historical truths of all history is that the oppressed never revere their oppressors.

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.

History isn’t morality.

History is not acceptable until it has been sifted for the truth.

As a historian I refuse to recognize an epochal boundary before the fact.

Historians may lie, but History cannot.

No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

History (white terror in Taiwan) cannot be forgotten. There is no history that cannot be declassified, no truth that cannot be revealed.

ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty. A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends. The most respectable of these influences are the most dangerous. The historian who neglects to root them out is exactly like a juror who votes according to his personal likes or dislikes. In judging men and things Ethics go before Dogma, Politics or Nationality. The Ethics of History cannot be denominational. Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience. Put conscience above both system and success. History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

[O]ne cannot respect the orthodox version of history without perpetuating the ideology behind it.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.