History Quotes
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
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
Never in the course of history, have so many owed so much to so few.Winston Churchill, Speech about World War II
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.Nikita Khrushchev
History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.Donald Creighton
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.John Still
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
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.George Orwell, Essay: "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)
The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.Karl R. Poppe
Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.Unknown
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.Edward R. Murrow
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken.James Joyce
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.Wystan Hugh Auden
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
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
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
Most history is a record of triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who made no nuisance of themselves in the world.Philip Howard
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.Woody Allen
We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Women with pasts interest men... they hope history will repeat itself.Mae West
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted the indifference of those who should have known better the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most that has made it possible for evil to triumph.Haile Selassie
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.Barbara Tuchman
Morpheus Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.Matrix, The
Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.Margaret Thatche
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.Joseph Conrad
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.Albert Camus
History is a set of lies agreed upon.Napoleon Bonaparte
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
History never looks like history when you are living through it.John W. Gardner, quoted by Bill Moyers
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
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
If we fight a war and win it with H - Bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.Hans A. Bethe
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
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
I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.George W. Bush, September 2, 2004, The Republican National Convention, N. Y.
Geschichte ist... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit. re - Transl.: History is... a dialogue between the present and the past.Edward Hallet Carr, Was ist Geschichte?, S. 54
It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.John B. Gough
