History Quotes

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

No great leader in history fought to prevent change.

John Maxwell, 21 Indispensible Qualities of a Leade

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

Barbara Tuchman

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

James Joyce

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

Arnold Toynbee

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

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (p. 208)

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

Georges Clemenceau

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

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.

Albert Coope

We are all citizens of history.

Clifton Paul Fadiman

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

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

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Gustave Flaubert

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

While history is much more than a record of magnified personal encounters, it also remains rooted in individual personalities.

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Mark Twain

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

George Frost Kennan

If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

Albert Camus

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

Happy are the people whose annals are blank in history books.

Thomas Carlyle

Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.

Unknown

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

Edward Gibbon

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

J. W. Schopf

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.

Cicero, Pro Publio Sestio

Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary.

Marshal Tito

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge That myth is more potent than history That dreams are more powerful than facts That hope always triumphs over experience That laughter is the only cure for grief And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert

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

Churchill

Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.

Robert Orben

History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.

Donald Creighton

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - But it is terrible when one has to live it.

Jean Anouilh

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

Sir Winston Churchill