History Quotes
We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the centre of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary. - Alexander Maclaren
Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others. - Elizabeth Janeway
Washington loves the ones who grease its gears. But history only remembers the ones who shift them. - Marjorie Williams
Whether or not the standard of living made possible by mass production and in turn by mass circulation, is supported by and filled with the work of us hucksters, I guess is something that only history can decide. - Leo Burnett
Human history in essence is the history of ideas. - H. G. Wells
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall, think of it, always. - Mohandas K. 'Mahatma' Gandhi
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. - Rudyard Kipling
There was an ancient Roman lawyer, of great fame in the history of Roman jurisprudence, whom they called Cui Bono, from his having first introduced into judicial proceedings the argument, 'What end or object could the party have had in the act with which he is accused. - Edmund Burke
History is a cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. - Pearl Buck
History is philosophy teaching by examples. – Thucydides
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. - James Baldwin
The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din
Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
- John Greenleaf Whittier
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters. - African Proverb
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from. - John Still
All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon. - Voltaire
Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree. - Michael Crichton
We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre. - Dick Gregory
History is herstory, too. - Author Unknown
A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false. - Thomas Babington Macaulay
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. - Winston Churchill
History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background. - Thomas Carlyle
History is a novel for which the people is the author. - Alfred de Vigny
History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity. - Dexter Perkins
History was a trash bag of random coincidences torn open in a wind. Surely, Watt with his steam engine, Faraday with his electric motor, and Edison with his incandescent light bulb did not have it as their goal to contribute to a fuel shortage some day that would place their countries at the mercy of Arab oil. - Joseph Heller
Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects. – Herodotus
History: gossip well told. - Elbert Hubbard
History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses. - Charles Angoff
If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me! - George Macaulay Trevelyan
The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter. - Hendrik Wilhelm van Loon
Historians are gossips who tease the dead. – Voltaire
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up. - Voltaire
We are the prisoners of history. Or are we? - Robert Penn Warren
History never looks like history when you are living through it. - John W. Gardner
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age. - H.L. Mencken
God cannot alter the past, though historians can. - Samuel Butler
History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided. - Konrad Adenauer
Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be. - P.J. O'Rourke
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. - Mark Twainr
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. - Plato, Ion
History is a vast early warning system. - Norman Cousins
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. - H.L. Mencken
Historian: A broad-gauge gossip. - Ambrose Bierce
History is a great dust heap. - Thomas Carlyle
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. - Will and Ariel Durant
A lot of history is just dirty politics cleaned up for the consumption of children and other innocents. - Richard Reeves
History is past politics, and politics present history. - John Robert Seeley
Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history that we are delivered from our bonds and escape - into time. - A.L. Rowse
The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history? - Katharine Anthony
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind. - W.H. Auden
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. Eisenhower
Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up. - Author Unknown
History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force. - Frederick Maurice Powicke
Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction. - W.H. Auden
More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations. - John Barth
If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. - Pierre Bayle
Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos. - Thomas A. Bailey
Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers. - Thomas Carlyle
People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery. - Aristide Briand
Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books. - Thomas Carlyle
Sin writes histories, goodness is silent. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.-Irving R. Kaufman
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.-Woodrow Wilson
The Marine Corps is the Navy's police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin's.-Harry S. Truman
The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.-Nikita Khrushchev
The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.-Dwight D. Eisenhower
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.-A. Whitney Brown
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.-Peter Berger
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.-Jessamyn West
The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.-Lance Morrow
The Russians feared Ike. They didn't fear me.-Lyndon B. Johnson
The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.-Irving R. Kaufman
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.-Franklin D. Roosevelt
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.-Mark Twain
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.-William James
There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.-William Halsey
They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.-James Stockdale
They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.-Douglas MacArthur
They were afraid, never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.-G. Gordon Liddy
This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.-Neil Armstrong
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.-George Santayana