History Quotes

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

George Stanley McGovern

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, Eminent Victorians (1918)

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

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 a vision of God? s creation on the move.

Arnold Toynbee

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

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.

Murray Edelman, _Politics as Symbolic Action_, p. 1

The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

Robertson Davies

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary.

Marshal Tito

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

Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel