History Quotes - Page 2

History is not another name for the past as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

History is: Fables agreed upon - Voltaire The biography of a few stout and earnest persons - Ralph Waldo Emerson A vast Mississippi of falsehood - Matthew Arnold A confused heap of facts - Lord Chesterfield A cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man -

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Abraham Lincoln

After 15 years of work I have achieved as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower the unity of the German nation and have freed it from the death sentence of Versailles.

Adolf Hitler

History is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print the main thing is still to make history not to write it.

Otto von Bismarck

History is the devil's scripture.

Lord Byron

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

Thomas Carlyle

In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

John Fowles

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

W.H. Auden

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

Dean William R. Inge

The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Eric Hoffer

The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

Saki

When the historian Charles A. Beard was asked about the lessons from history he said there were four: 1. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 2. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power. 3. The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small. 4. When it is dark enough you can see the stars.

Charles A. Beard

History doesn't pass the dishes again.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.

Anonymous

Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Herodotus

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

Sara Sheridan

Each of us play a unique role in the history of life. What legacy do you want to live behind?

Lailah Gifty Akita

Respond to your ability, play your part and make your mark in history.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Today is the first day in history.-One of Nathan's Daily GemsFrom the 'Book Store ON Main Street'Seal Beach, CA

Diana Hollingsworth Gessler

We have to remember, sometimes the most important history is the history we're making today.

J.K. Rowling

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

Sara Sheridan

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

Don DeLillo

The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.

Terry Deary

To understand how that astounding moral blindness was possible, it is helpful to think of the workers of an armament plant who rejoice in the 'stay of execution' of their factory thanks to big new orders, while at the same time honestly bewailing the massacres visited upon each other by Ethiopians and Eritreans; or to think how it is possible that the 'fall in commodity prices' may be universally welcomed as good news while 'starvation of African children' is equally universally, and sincerely, lamented.

Zygmunt Bauman

The church and the scientific community are fighting at times a common enemy: the truth religion cannot deny and the positivist materialist scientist is unable to explain.

Paul Greene

To embrace the belief that man is the accidental product of a random and otherwise genetically and biologically impossible Darwinian gradual evolution allegedly monitored by a quasi-fictitious natural selection, a process that supposedly started with an amoeba nobody knows how it arrived on Earth that somehow became a fish with stumps for legs that turned crocodile, a creature that following successive transmutations “evolved” into an ape that ended up as Leonardo Da Vinci is an attitude that comes in conflict with the scientific method of research and it certainly violates its standard principles.

Paul Greene

Religion thrives on want and fear of the unknown, on lack of education. A frightened and confused human is fed by religious institutions with the illusion that the solution to his real problems is to appeal to the good will of an imaginary supernatural divinity religious institutions claim to represent. With one hand they offer a cup of rice and a pair of used shoes someone else has paid for. With the other, they place the Bible on the table, setting up the poor in spirit for the belief trap.

Paul Greene

Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.

Paul Greene

That everything in nature has “the appearance” of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.

Paul Greene

… between the irrational promoted in churches and the Darwinian pseudo-science taught in schools, a revolution in the way we understand reality is not only necessary but also long overdue.

Paul Greene

Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies........And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples.

Seyom Brown

With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.

The Bureau Chiefs

Could it be that simple? Tell one story to one generation and repeat it until it was accepted as fact?

Kiera Cass

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...

Oswald Spengler

History is often made and buttressed by myths and folklore rather than facts.

Daikichi Irokawa

We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.

Philippa Gregory

When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.

Bonnie Greer

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion ... that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them.

Dan Brown

When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals,—the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor.

W.E.B. Du Bois

It is but another instance of injustice, Fray Felipe said. For twenty years we, of the missions, have been subjected to it, and it grows. The sainted Junipero Serra invaded this land when other men feared, and at San Diego de Alcala he built the first mission of what became a chain, thus giving an empire to the world. Our mistake was that we prospered. We did the work, and others reap the advantages. They began taking out mission-lands from us, lands we had cultivated, which had formed a wilderness and which my brothers had turned into gardens and orchards. They robbed us of worldly goods. And not content with that they now are persecuting us. The mission-empire is doomed, caballero. The time is not far distant when mission roofs will fall in and walls crumble away. Some day people will look at the ruins and wonder how such a thing could come to pass.

Johnston McCulley

Today’s youngsters will unfortunately never know the thrills we experienced dubbing movies in the era of Rashomon.

Teruyo Nogami

Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you.

Salman Rushdie

Her voice was caught in the shell of my ear, as if it were the ocean.

Jodi Picoult

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

Edmund Burke

History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.

Stephen King

The reason for which Picasso was compelled to resort to signs and allegories should now be clear enough: his utter political helplessness in the face of a historical situation which he set out to record; his titanic effort to confront a particular historical event with an allegedly eternal truth; his desire to give hope and comfort and to provide a happy ending, to compensate for the terror, the destruction, and inhumanity of the event. Picasso did not see what Goya had already seen, namely, that the course of history can be changed only by historical means and only if men shape their own history instead of acting as the automaton of an earthly power or an allegedly eternal idea.

Max Raphael

Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status

Robert Trivers

I said. “I’m fine. I have a little bit of a head ache, but I’m not dizzy or nauseous. I can walk and talk just fine, and I can remember everything.” “Everything, huh? Don’t self-diagnose, Doctor Fisher. Do you remember when the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought?” “The what?” “The Battle of Bunker Hill. We covered it in World Civ.” “No, we did not.” “We did, too. The unit on the American Revolution.” “Davin, that was like, two years ago! I don’t remember stuff like that!” “So, not everything.” “Everything important.” “That happens to have been a very significant battle,” Davin reminded me, in a smug tone.

J.M. Richards

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

Assata Shakur

When I started researching airline stewardesses, I found that the topic made for amusing cocktail party banter.“You’re writing a book about that? Wow, what fun!”Yes, it was fun, but it was also serious history. Pretty women do not fit into what we have come to think of as serious history. Real history covers topics like Lincoln, World War II, or, frankly, anything involving powerful white males.

Victoria Vantoch

History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.

Robert Lowell

History is biology's dumping ground

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation.

Robert Remak

Whoever is born in New York is ill-equipped to deal with any other city: all other cities seem, at best, a mistake, and, at worst, a fraud. No other city is so spitefully incoherent. Whereas other cities flaunt there history - their presumed glory - in vividly placed monuments, squares, parks, plaques, and boulevards, such history as New York has been unable entirely to obliterate is to be found, mainly, in the backwaters of Wall Street, in the goat tracks of Old and West Broadway, in and around Washington Square, and, for the relentless searcher, in grimly inaccessible regions of The Bronx.

James Baldwin

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.

Teju Cole

The ghosts of Manhattan are not the spirits of the propertied classes; these are entombed in their names, their works, their constructions. New York's ghosts are the unresting souls of the poor, the marginal, the dispossessed, the depraved, the defective, the recalcitrant. They are the guardian spirits of the urban wilderness in which they lived and died. Unrecognized by the history that is common knowledge, they push invisibly behind it to erect their memorials in the collective unconscious.

Luc Sante

For historical currents do not irresistibly propel themselves and everyone in their path. No matter what their broader structural or ideological roots, they both carry along and are carried along by people, who are not merely passengers of history, but pilots as well.

Doug McAdam

Previous 1 2 3 4 … 61 Next

History Quotes - Page 2

Related Topics