History Quotes

There began to appear before my romantic eyes...a vast and complicated network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate, from which no one, official or private, could escape.

I'd rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.

Benjamin Franklin

I often noticed that the surrounding mountains inspired Hitler. He once joked that here he stood 'above the world' in an environment comparable to Olympius, legendary mount of the gods, but that alone can never have been the motivation for himto put down his private roots on Obersalzberg.

I only read books I know I will like

Start to focus on things that unite the races of people instead of things that divide us, and you will have already won the battle, and are a building block to the solution.

Ted Harts

If you put forth a small amount of effort, you just might find your next best friend for life is of a different race than your own.

Ted Harts

History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

R.G. Collingwood

Those who neglect the lessons of their past are doomed to no future.

T.A. Uner

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

We should keep the Panama Canal. After all we stole it fair and square.

The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.

Henry Kissinger

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

Dictators ride to and fro on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.

Winston Churchill

History is something that never happened written by a man who wasn't there.

Anonymous

History a distillation of rumor

The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces the chief points in the process of history.

Edward Bernstein

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

There is properly no history only biography.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes follies and misfortunes of mankind.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Napoleon

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

Friedrich von Schlegel

All history is a lie!

Sir Robert Walpole

Human history is in essence a history of ideas.

H.G.Wells

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds.

Abraham Lincoln

Give the historians something to write about.

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.

War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.

The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.

History is past politics and politics present history.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Stendhal

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

When great changes occur in history when great principles are involved as a rule the majority are wrong.

More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.

History n: an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools.

The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.

T.S Eliot

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

History is more or less bunk.

I have no history but the length of my bones.

History is a pact between the dead the living and the yet unborn.

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

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

The world's history is constant like the laws of nature and simple like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.

Friedrich von Schiller

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

Most history is a record of the triumphs disasters and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute inglorious men and women who made no nuisance of themselves in the world.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past historians can - it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us.

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy and it always feels uncomfortable.

John W. Gardner

History is philosophy learned from examples.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

Noble acts and momentous events happen in the same way and produce the same impression as the ordinary facts.

Roberto Rossellini

Don't brood on what's past but never forget it either.

Thomas H. Raddall

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

Stephen Leacock

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

Hendrik Willem van Loon

The historian looks backward. In the end he also believes backward.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

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