History Quotes

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

Barbara Tuchman

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 makes us some amends for the shortness of life.

Philip Skelton

Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for good.

Lyndon B. Johnson

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

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

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

Margaret Mead

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

Donald Creighton

History teaches us that when a barbarian race confronts a sleeping culture, the barbarian always wins.

Arnold J. Toynbee

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Aldous Huxley

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

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 Eisenhowe

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.

Adolf Hitle

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

James A. Garfield

Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself.

Mae West

History is fables agreed upon.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

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

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

James Joyce

America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused? preferring greatness to power and justice to glory.

George W. Bush, speech, November 19, 1999

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.

In history as in life it is success that counts. Start a political upheaval and let yourself be caught, and you will hang as a traitor. But place yourself at the head of a rebellion and gain your point, and all future generations will worship you as the Father of their Country.

Hendrik W. Van Loon

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 better guide than good intentions.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

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

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

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

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Stephen Spende

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Albert Camus

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

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

Margaret Thatche

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

Edward Gibbon

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

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 pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.

Edmund Burke

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility - I welcome it.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy