"I don't care how experienced one gets working with historic documents—there is still something that sends a charge right up your spine. ... Our trade is preserving the real historic place, in real time, for this and future generations to see and experience—to get a 'charge,' if you will. That experience and a thousand others like it—different in scale or purpose—are the true value of historic preservation. They transform past into present, and present into future—giving context to ideas and anchorage to experience." Robert G. Stanton, director, National Park Service, upon NPS receiving the Louise duPont Crowninshield Award.

"What is past is prologue." William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English playwright and poet

"The story of civilization is, in a sense, the story of engineering--that long and arduous struggle to make the forces of nature work for man's good." L. Sprague DeCamp

"History is concerned with time, space, and change. It is concerned with the unique person, with the unique event, and with their combination." James C. Malin, "The Historian and the Individual," in Essays on Individuality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958)

"The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history." James Kip Finch, engineer

"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort." Gaston Bachelard, 1884-1962, French scientist, philosopher, and literary theorist, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, "A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books" (1988; tr. 1990)

"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce, 1882-1941, Irish writer

"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, U.S. writer and philosopher

"The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions." Georg Hegel, 1770-1831, German philosopher, The Philosophy of History (1837)

"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel, French historian

"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx, 1818-1883, German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary

"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena, 1083-1148?, Byzantine princess and historian

"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford, 1863-1947, U.S. automobile manufacturer

"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis

"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German philosopher

"Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German philosopher, Thoughts Out of Season (1874)

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner, 1861-1932, U.S. historian

"The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves -- a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future." Carl Becker, 1873-1945, U.S. historian

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." H. G. Wells, 1866-1946, British writer

"Human history is in essence a history of ideas." H. G. Wells, 1866-1946, British writer, The Outline of History (1920)

"It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening." H. G. Wells, 1866-1946, British author, "The Discovery of the Future," Lecture, 24 January 1902, at the Royal Institute, London (published in Nature, no. 65, 1902)

"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988, U.S. science fiction writer, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long

"It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgement." Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, English philosopher, essayist, and statesman, Advancement of Learning (1605)

"The whole past is the procession of the present." Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, British historian and essayist

"The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves." Marcus T. Cicero, 106-43 B.C.E., Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher

"History is a better guide than good intentions." Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-, U.S. political scientist and United States ambassador to the United Nations (1981-1985)

"There is a history in all men's lives." William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English playwright and poet

"History knows no resting places and no plateaus." Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), U.S. Republican politician, secretary of state, White House Years (1979)

"A people without history is like the wind on the buffalo grass." Sioux saying

"Man . . . cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900, German philosopher

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past." Milan Kundera, Czech novelist

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love." Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971, U.S. theologian and historian, The Irony of American History (1952)

"In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity." Leo Tolstoi, 1828-1910, Russian novelist and philosopher. War and Peace (1868-69)

"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke, 1795-1886, German historian who pioneered the modern methods of rigorously analyzing firsthand documentation