History Quotes

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

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (p. 208)

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.

Alvin Toffle

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

It is not observed in history that families improve with time.

George William Curtis

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac

I believe that the supreme duty of the historian is to write history, that is to say, to attempt to record in one sweeping sequence the greater events and movements that have swayed the destiny of man.

Steven Runciman

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Margaret Thatche

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

From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned. I insist that this shall cease. The country needs repose after all its trials it deserves repose. And repose can only be found in everlasting principles.

Charles Sumne

Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

Walt Whitman

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spende

History repeats itself and history never repeats itself are about equally trueWe never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

George Macaulay Trevelyan

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Dwight D Eisenhowe

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

Sir Winston Churchill

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - And often in the short one - The most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

Arthur C. Clarke, The Exploration of Space, 1951

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.

William Shakespeare

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

Russell Hoban

For four - Fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum.

J. W. Schopf

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Mitch Ratliffe

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

G. M. Trevelyan

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Hermann Hesse

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

John Still

History knows no resting places and no plateaus.

Henry Kissinge

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Poppe

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Aldous Huxley

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others history, men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Aldous Huxley

Regrets are idle yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

Charles Dudley Warne

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - Or to make it the last.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Robert Frost

For a while I thought history was something bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... for Jack history was full of heroes.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

History is a vision of God? s creation on the move.

Arnold Toynbee

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.

Mark Beltaire

I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

Jack Handey Deep Thoughts