History Quotes

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation, Jan 16, 1984

Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - Or to make it the last.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac

During the Second World War, the Germans took four years to build the Atlantic Wall. On four beaches it held up the Allies for about an hour; at Omaha it held up the U. S. for less than one day. The Atlantic Wall must therefore be regarded as one of the greatest blunders in military history.

Stephen Ambrose, D - Day, page 577

History knows no resting places and no plateaus.

Henry Kissinge

Never in the course of history, have so many owed so much to so few.

Winston Churchill, Speech about World War II

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

James A. Forude

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

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.

Dave Barry

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

Stephen Covey

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

Thomas Carlyle

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people - A black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.

Margaret Thatche

Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.

William James

This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation. Saluting crew of the Apollo 11.

Richard Milhous Nixon

I am responsible only to God and history.

Francisco Franco

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

Bertie Forbes

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.

James A. Garfield

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

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

Regrets are idle yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

Charles Dudley Warne

No man is truly great, who is great only in his life - Time. The test of greatness is the page of history.

William Hazlitt, on the Pleasure of Hating

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

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone therefore, we are saved by love.

Reinhold Niebuh

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.

James Joyce

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner, quoted by Bill Moyers

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

Joseph Conrad

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built - In mental disorder which drives him towards self - Destruction.

Arthur Koestle

Mathematics is a vast adventure in ideas; its history reflects some of the noblest thoughts of countless generations.

Dirk Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics, vol. I

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Robert Frost

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

Jack Handey Deep Thoughts

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Mahatma Gandhi

It is not I who have been consigned to the bedroom of history.

Corazn Cojuangco Aquino