History Quotes

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

Morpheus Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Matrix, The

We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present.

Lawrence K. Frank

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

Margaret Thatche

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

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Georges Clemenceau

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

Stephen Jay Gould

We are all citizens of history.

Clifton Paul Fadiman

Never in the course of history, have so many owed so much to so few.

Winston Churchill, Speech about World War II

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

Franklin P. Jones

In the South of California has gathered the larges and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations.

Farnsworth Crowde

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Virginia Woolf

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the governing of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address

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 makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.

Gustave Flaubert

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

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Joseph Conrad

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

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

Churchill

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

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.

W. H. Auden

History does not repeat itself except in the minds of those who do not know history.

Kahlil Gibran

Some people make headlines while others make history.

Philip Elmer - DeWitt, in Time Magazine

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

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

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (p. 208)

I am responsible only to God and history.

Francisco Franco

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

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

Edward Gibbon

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Thomas Carlyle

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

Leonard Louis Levinson

History balances the frustration of how far we have to go with the satisfaction of how far we have come. It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner, quoted by Bill Moyers

The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.

Frederic William Maitland

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw

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 is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins