history quotes
" But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical ... "
Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
13
" I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed... "
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
13
" Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly fr... "
Mark Hopkins
Mark Hopkins
12
" we must make up our minds to look for our protection not to legal terrors but to careful ... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
12
" The fullness of grace can transform the human heart and enable it to do something so great... "
Pope Francis
Pope Francis
12
" Every Messianic movement known to history has arisen in a society that has been subjected ... "
Peter Farb
Peter Farb
12
" We will go down in history either as the world's greatest statesmen or its worst villains. "
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring
12
" If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of foll... "
James Frazer
James Frazer
12
" When people cannot write good literature it is perhaps natural that they should lay down r... "
George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
12
" It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stu... "
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
12
" History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums... "
Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan
11
" I know many crooks and they never preach, but I don't know anyone who preaches that isn't ... "
Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli
11
" No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too ... "
Sam Harris
Sam Harris
11
" Now the only sure basis of an alliance is for each party to be equally afraid of the othe... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
11
" On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great st... "
Edward Bellamy
Edward Bellamy
11
" Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accompl... "
Karlheinz Deschner
Karlheinz Deschner
11
" Neither a wise man or a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train... "
Dwight David Eisenhower
Dwight David Eisenhower
11
" An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it... "
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford
11
" We must delve into our roots and reconstruct what history has divided. We can't wait for t... "
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
11
" Do you really think one can be truly loving when one is short of bread? "
Antoine François Prévost
Antoine François Prévost
11
" I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, so good night! "
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
10
" No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the w... "
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho
10
" From the humanistic point of view every human achievement is unforgettable and immortal in... "
George Sarton
George Sarton
10
" It was an appalling thought, to be so well-integrated into the machinery of society and hi... "
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
10
" I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and... "
Will Durant
Will Durant
10
" Right or community of blood was not the bond of union between them, so much as interest or... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
10
" I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usaully g... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
10
" It is important to realize that the market economy, though it is associated historically w... "
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
10
" The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
10
" A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesse... "
Walter Scott
Walter Scott
10
" For ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of ... "
Plutarch
Plutarch
10
" That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is wi... "
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
10
" The history of free men is never really written by chance-but by choice-their choice. "
Dwight David Eisenhower
Dwight David Eisenhower
10
" History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the... "
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
10
" This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious r... "
Titus Livius
Titus Livius
10
" Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church; it is responsib... "
Huston Smith
Huston Smith
9
" Which ever one of you will want to become a journalist, let him remember to choose his own... "
Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli
9
" The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only ... "
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
9
" Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depri... "
Mahatma Gandhi
Mahatma Gandhi
9
" We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. "
Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin
9
" The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman con... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
9
" The present enshrines the pastand in the past all history has been made by men. "
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
9
" The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of ... "
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
9
" If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar ... "
Wernher von Braun
Wernher von Braun
9
" As president, I will take steps to ban the box, so former presidents won't have to declare... "
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton
9
" One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by ol... "
Richard Weaver
Richard Weaver
9
" History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. "
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
9
" In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to exe... "
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
9
" Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe "
Herbert George Wells
Herbert George Wells
9
" A sign of a celebrity is often that his name is worth more than his services. "
Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin
8
" concessions to adversaries only end in self reproach, and the more strictly they are avoi... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
8
" We must realize, too, that, both for cities and for individuals, it is from the greatest ... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
8
" History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
8
" General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human i... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
8
" A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience and many... "
Adlai Stevenson
Adlai Stevenson
8
" What chiefly diverts the men of democracies from lofty ambition is not the scantiness of t... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
8
" The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. "
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
8
" Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the mos... "
Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford
8
" Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole... "
Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
8
" We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have w... "
George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
8
" Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who ... "
George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
8
" Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which bur... "
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon
8
" A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty "
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
8
" I have always been I think any student of history almost inevitably is a cheerful pe... "
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
8
" The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last fi... "
Celia Green
Celia Green
8
" Read day and night, devour booksthese sleeping pillsnot to know but to forget! Through... "
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
7
" I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early. "
Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin
7
" Hatred also is short lived; but that which makes the splendor of the present and the glory... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
7
" The culture of the Anasazi is still the best known of all prehistoric southwestern culture... "
Peter Farb
Peter Farb
7
" Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so diff... "
Charles Dudley Warner
Charles Dudley Warner
7
" So many of my thoughts and feelings are shared by the English that England has turned into... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
7
" No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself throu... "
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
7
" Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as lang... "
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
7
" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men. "
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
7
" Indeed rhetoricians are permitted to lie about historical matters so they can speak more s... "
Cicero
Cicero
7
" The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings ... "
Adam Ferguson
Adam Ferguson
7
" Now, in the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the ... "
John F Kennedy
John F Kennedy
7
" The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer lose... "
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer
7
" We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being... "
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
7
" Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonid... "
George William Curtis
George William Curtis
7
" Man's naked form on the other hand belongs to no particular moment in history ; it is ete... "
Auguste Rodin
Auguste Rodin
7
" Man is constantly being assured that he has more power than ever before in history, but hi... "
Richard Weaver
Richard Weaver
7
" In ceasing to subordinate creative power to any supreme value, modern art has brought home... "
André Malraux
André Malraux
7
" The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich worl... "
Ha-Joon Chang
Ha-Joon Chang
7
" What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies... "
Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
7
" Perhaps it is historically true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own han... "
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
7
" The historical order is very interesting, but accidental and capricious; if we would to un... "
George Sarton
George Sarton
6
" The whole past and the whole world are alive in my heart, and I shall do my part to commun... "
George Sarton
George Sarton
6
" History shows that the thinkers who mounted on the top of the ladder of questions, who set... "
Emil Cioran
Emil Cioran
6
" I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral... "
Charlie Chaplin
Charlie Chaplin
6
" History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never repr... "
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
6
" The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory an... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
6
" when night came on, the Macedonians and the barbarian crowd suddenly took fright in one o... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
6
" He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will never come real visibilit... "
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
6
" The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a s... "
George W Bush
George W Bush
6
" The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the... "
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
6
" Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentlen... "
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
6
" Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wh... "
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
6
" The peculiar and amusing nature of those answers stems from the fact that modern history i... "
Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
5
" Italian husbands, in order to buy their wives a fur, spend more than all their European co... "
Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli
5
" the Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
5
" Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history o... "
Lewis H. Lapham
Lewis H. Lapham
5
" The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but... "
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
5
" Children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and... "
Plutarch
Plutarch
5
5
" Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to bei... "
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
5
" Men do not know how to appreciate and measure luck except that of others. Their own never. "
Indro Montanelli
Indro Montanelli
4
" History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact i... "
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
4
" If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid... "
Arthur Koestler
Arthur Koestler
4
" he who voluntarily confronts tremendous odds must have very great internal resources to d... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
4
" Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyerand that is... "
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand
4
" Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers. "
Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin
3
" Men do not rest content with parrying the attacks of a superior, but often strike the firs... "
Thucydides
Thucydides
3
" The work we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully. "
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
3