History Quotes
A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long
A page of history is worth a pound of logic.Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
History is full of surprises.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.Jean Genet
Religion is the monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.William James
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built - In mental disorder which drives him towards self - Destruction.Arthur Koestle
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.Georges Clemenceau
We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears.John Ruskin
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.Plato
Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith - A desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will - But faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world - Faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.George Frost Kennan
Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.Unknown
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.Barbara Ehrenreich
The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.E. M. Cioran
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.Sir Winston Churchill
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.H. G. Wells
The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.Karl R. Poppe
I am responsible only to God and history.Francisco Franco
Some people make headlines while others make history.Philip Elmer - DeWitt, in Time Magazine
History is little else than a picture of human crimes and misfortunes.Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.Abba Eban
When you read history it is quite astonishing to discover that there never was a day when men thought times were really good. Every generation in history has been haunted by the feeling of crisis.Harold Walke
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
Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.Carl Sagan
However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time.Peter Quennell
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.Edward R. Murrow
The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but what takes place in our hearts.Sir Arthur Keith
During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour at Omaha it held up the U. S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.Stephen Ambrose
I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.George W. Bush, September 2, 2004, The Republican National Convention, N. Y.
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.Mahatma Gandhi, _Gandhi, An Autobiography_, page 446
Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for good.Lyndon B. Johnson
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.Dwight David Eisenhowe
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
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.Maya Angelou
Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.Mahatma Gandhi
Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.Gustave Flaubert
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - Ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
