History Quotes

C. p. snow - when you think of the long and gloomy history of...
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Anna Mary Robertson Moses
Regrets are idle yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
Charles Dudley Warne
Virginia woolf - for most of history, anonymous was a woman....
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
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.
Willa Sibert Cathe
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.
Plato
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
Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.
Murray Edelman, _Politics as Symbolic Action_, p. 1
What experience and history teach is this - That nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
Thomas Paine, "The Age of Reason".
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw
History is a better guide than good intentions.
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
History repeats itself and history never repeats itself are about equally trueWe never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
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
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
George Orwell, Essay: "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
History is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.
David Hume
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
The history of the human race, viewed as a whole may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
Immanuel Kant
For a while I thought history was something bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... for Jack history was full of heroes.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. Wells
Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.
Robert Orben
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
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
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
Russell Hoban
For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.
Margaret Mead
Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.
Unknown
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
Morpheus Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
Matrix, The
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.
Churchill
Religion is the monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
William James
While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.
Theodore Roosevelt
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau
The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.
Frederic William Maitland
Well behaved women seldom make history.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
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
To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.
George Stanley McGovern
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
Georges Clemenceau
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
Nadia Boulange