History Quotes

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Peter Drucke

In all our efforts to provide advantages we have actually produced the busiest, most competitive, highly pressured, and over - Organized generation of youngsters in our history.

Eda J. Le Shan

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

James A. Forude

History is bunk.

Henry Ford

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishfull thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers chapter 4

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Mark Twain

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Albert Camus

A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses

Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.

Immanuel Kant

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Camille Paglia

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1972)

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

Franois Maurice Mitterrand

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (p. 208)

May it not be that, just as we have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that faith is even more difficult for Him than it is for us.

Wystan Hugh Auden

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

Christa McAuliffe

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused? preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

George W. Bush, speech, November 19, 1999

History is the unfolding of miscalculation.

Barbara Tuchman

History is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.

David Hume

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning its two eyes are geography and chronology.

James A. Garfield

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

Willa Sibert Cathe

History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.

Donald Creighton

Perhaps nothing has changed in the course of history as much as historians.

Franklin P. Jones

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

Bertie Forbes

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair, the other to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

Erich Fromm

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel

When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it? always.

Mahatma Gandhi

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

E. M. Cioran

What is history but a fable agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

Robert Anson Heinlein

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

William James

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Churchill

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

Theodore Harold White