History Quotes

Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

Walt Whitman

An honest election, under democracy, is an act of innocence which does not take place more than once in the history of a given nation.

Jose Marie Gil Robles, speech in Madrid, 1933

More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to utter hopelessness and despair, the other to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

History, although sometimes made up of the few acts of the great, is more often shaped by the many acts of the small.

Mark Yost

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain

History is philosophy teaching by examples.

Henry St. John Bolingbroke

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

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

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

Tonight we are launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.

Ronald Reagan

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

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

Gustave Flaubert

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Mitch Ratliffe

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Dwight David Eisenhowe

History is the unfolding of miscalculation.

Barbara Tuchman

Those who don? t build must burn. It? s as old as history and juvenile delinquence.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

Tom Stoppard

History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.

George W. Bush

News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day.

Gene Fowle

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Barbara Ehrenreich

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spende

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

Robert Orben

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

Erich Fromm

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Benjamin Disraeli

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.

Nikita Khrushchev, remark at the Polish embasy in Moscow, Nov. 18, 1956

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

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

Well - Behaved women rarely make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

Margaret Mead

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

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

Arnold Toynbee

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.

Dan Quayle

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

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