Great Quotes

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

~ Thomas Carlyle

There are great legends and great fighters in the history of Mexico, and there will be more to come.

~ Canelo Alvarez

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

~ Steven Johnson

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

~ Paul Valéry

I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It's really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.

~ Nikki Giovanni

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

~ Barney Frank

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

~ Thomas Friedman

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

~ James Buchan

In the course of American history, great steps are taken by ordinary people, and ordinary people are not perfect.

~ Tommy Lee Jones

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

~ Neil Armstrong

We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.

~ Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

~ Dick Gregory

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

~ Isabel Wilkerson

Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

~ Benjamin Disraeli

So many struggled so that all of us could have a voice in this great democracy and live up to the first three words of our constitution: We the people. I love that phrase so much. Throughout our country's history, we've expanded the meaning of that phrase to include more and more of us. That's what it means to move forward.

~ Kerry Washington

In the history of mankind there are recorded two great Inversions. The first, set forth by the Nazarene to the effect that love is a greater power and more real than vengeance. The second proclaimed the earth to be a sphere revolving in its course around the sun. These affirmations were made in the face of all evidence sacred to the contrary.

~ Louis Sullivan

No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.

~ Alfred North Whitehead

France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

~ Johnny Depp

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

~ Eugene V. Debs

My friends, history, history calls us to this time and to this place. A solemn choice rests with us - where do we go from here? Do we move slowly and incrementally? Or do we seize the challenge of our time and tackle the great issues of our day.

~ Thomas Vilsack

Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail.

~ John Thorn

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

~ Henry James

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

~ D. H. Lawrence

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

~ Woodrow Wilson

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

~ Will Self

Winning the Super Bowl was obviously a great one, but the joy I felt of going to the Super Bowl, it was what I felt about the Pittsburgh Steelers and where we came from, the history of us to that point.

~ Joe Greene

The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask.

~ Salman Rushdie

I'm going down in history with Star Trek. It's a great feeling.

~ Persis Khambatta

History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.

~ Johan Huizinga

Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.

~ Leigh Hunt

We know that golf is an ancient game with great history and tradition, but our golf is only 10 years old so don't judge us too harshly.

~ Nursultan Nazarbayev

The new year 2015 will be a year of great significance, in which we will mark the 70th anniversaries of national liberation and founding of the Workers' Party of Korea.

~ Kim Jong-Un

In 1998, Vanity Fair asked me to write a big piece for them on the 50th anniversary of the New York City Ballet. My life, to a great extent, had been spent at and with the New York City Ballet, and I decided to try it. It was very scary, writing about something I loved so much and had such strong opinions about.

~ Robert Gottlieb

'Georgia' is very personal to me. 'Anniversary Party' was great. 'Anomalisa' is also another one that, particularly, is in my heart and will be forever. I do think it's a masterpiece; I really do.

~ Jennifer Jason Leigh

Windows 95 had its 20th anniversary last year, so we got our hands on an old system and showed it to teenagers who were not even alive in 1995. The results were pretty great and also makes you feel quite old.

~ Benny Fine

I was given such a great gift. It's a miracle that never stops amazing me and reminding me to give thanks, every day. Having a wife and daughter gives me a lot more purpose. I was much more selfish before, but now I think about what kind of role model I'll be. I just want to be a better man.

~ Jake Owen

I am fully committed to Hannah Montana. It's what gave me this amazing opportunity to reach out to so many people. I'm really excited about our new season. We are making great new episodes that I can't wait for our fans to see and I'm looking forward to the 'Hannah Montana' movie that will be out in the spring.

~ Miley Cyrus

I was an amazing bartender and a great waiter. I think, in a way, that was my acting school.

~ Nick Frost

You can do anything and be a star. You can dress like however you want, and you can do whatever you want. If you wanna wear meat suits like Lady Gaga, good. She's freaking amazing! She's doing that, and she's unbelievable. I can wear T-shirts and still be great, too. So that's just what I'm proving to people.

~ Alessia Cara

The lesson of travel seems to be so banal, but so great, which is that people are just so amazingly decent the world over. Given the disparity of income and wealth, it's amazing not just that you don't get robbed everywhere - it's amazing you don't get eaten.

~ Geoff Dyer