History Quotes

No great leader in history fought to prevent change.

John Maxwell, 21 Indispensible Qualities of a Leade

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

Unknown

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

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

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

Joseph Conrad

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

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

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

Stephen Jay Gould

History is bunk.

Henry Ford

The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but what takes place in our hearts.

Sir Arthur Keith

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

Thomas Carlyle

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

Carl Rowen

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

However gradual the course of history, there must always be the day, even an hour and minute, when some significant action is performed for the first or last time.

Peter Quennell

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

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - Ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.

Alvin Toffle

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

Bernard Weisberger, America Afire

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

Voltaire

History is more or less bunk.

Henry Ford

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

James A. Garfield

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

William James

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams

Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.

Mark Beltaire

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishfull thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers chapter 4

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.

James Baldwin

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge That myth is more potent than history That dreams are more powerful than facts That hope always triumphs over experience That laughter is the only cure for grief And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Robert

History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.

Milton Friedman

What is history but a fable agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

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

Barbara Tuchman

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

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Thomas Carlyle

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

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

We are all citizens of history.

Clifton Paul Fadiman

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

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel