History Quotes

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

Georges Clemenceau

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

John Still

Well behaved women seldom make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Wystan Hugh Auden

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Sir Winston Churchill

Swindon What will history say Burgoyne History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

George Bernard Shaw

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

It is not observed in history that families improve with time.

George William Curtis

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

Franois Maurice Mitterrand

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - - A terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

George McGovern

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

William H. Borah

What is desperately needed... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.

Felix G. Rohatyn

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

Mitch Ratcliffe

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Poppe

We are all citizens of history.

Clifton Paul Fadiman

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

Willa Sibert Cathe

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Thomas Jefferson

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.

Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long

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

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996

A single event can shape our lives or change the course of history.

Deepak Chopra, The Return of Merlin

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

Richard Milhous Nixon

There was never in the history of the world a great politician who was not hated by large numbers of inferior men.

Unknown

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.

C. P. Snow

I cannot join the space program and restart my life as an astronaut, but this opportunity to connect my abilities as an educator with my interests in history and space is a unique opportunity to fulfill my early fantasies.

Christa McAuliffe

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

Leonard Louis Levinson

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

James A. Garfield

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

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex - Presidents Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.

Robert Joseph Bob Dole

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

William James

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Camille Paglia

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

Walter Bagehot

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

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

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

Unknown