History Quotes

Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.

~ Peter A. Lorge

The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.

~ Vladimir Lenin

To know the good from the bad, study a man or woman's history of actions, not their record of intentions.

~ Suzy Kassem

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

~ Arundhati Roy

History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.

~ Joshua Clover

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.

~ Eric D. Weitz

Who is fit to be elected?' asked Napoleon. 'A Caesar, an Alexander only comes along once a century, so that election must be a matter of chance.

~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

When a great man stands on a land for a moment, the land becomes not just a great land for a moment, but a great landmark!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

There's one country that can be trusted to understand the complexity of history, it's Nigeria.

~ Saminu Kanti

Ten men shouting will control ten thousand who choose to remain silent.

~ Joseph J. Haeggquist

Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a racist murderer. The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer.

~ Noam Chomsky

Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality.

~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

If there was one thing I had learned. . . it was that politics was a damn dirty business.

~ Clint Hill

[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

~ Anne Bartlett

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

~ Antonia Fraser

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia.

~ Adam Selzer

Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

~ Grover Cleveland

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

~ Henry Adams

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

~ Philippa Gregory

My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

~ Philippa Gregory

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.

~ Philippa Gregory

Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.

~ Philippa Gregory

She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.

~ Mahita Vas

If you think there’s a thing—anything—women didn’t do in the past, you’re wrong.

~ Kameron Hurley

I'd rather have a heart of goldThan all the treasure of the world.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.

~ Philippa Gregory

I think every woman in our culture is a feminist. They may refuse to articulate it, but if you were to take any woman back forty years and say, 'Is this a world you want to live in?' they would say, 'No.

~ Helen Mirren

Khatun (queen) is one of the most authoritative and magnificent words in the Mongolian language. It conveys regality, stateliness, and great strength. If something resists breaking no matter how much pressure is applied, it is described as khatun. The word can form part of a boy’s or girl’s names, signifying power and firmness combined with beauty and grace. Because of the admitted qualities of khatun, men have often borne names such as Khatun Temur, literally ‘Queen Iron’, and Khatun Baatar, 'Queen Hero’.

~ Jack Weatherford

Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

~ Karl Marx

I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.

~ Amelia Boynton Robinson

It’s important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.

~ Amelia Boynton Robinson

[We're] going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.

~ Viola Gregg Liuzzo

What a major mistake, having rejected pretty much all of the great talented female artists that have lived throughout the ages, art history is left incomplete. The validity of the written art history is as absent as those women left out.

~ Siren Waroe

For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.

~ Conn Iggulden

Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself.

~ Criss Jami

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

~ Jill Lepore

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

~ Hilary Mantel

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

~ Margaret Atwood