History Quotes

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

~ Napoléon Bonaparte

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

~ Aldous Huxley

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

~ Edmund Burke

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

~ Oscar Wilde

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

~ L.p. Hartley

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

~ Julian Barnes

Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

~ Lemony Snicket

Reality denied comes back to haunt.

~ Philip K. Dick

It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

~ Isaac Marion

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

~ Dan Brown

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top.

~ Sarah Vowell

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

~ Gregory Maguire

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

~ Karl Marx

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.

~ Philip Pullman

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

~ Alan Moore

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or musi

~ David Mccullough

History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.

~ George R.r. Martin

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

~ Golda Meir

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.

~ Bill Watterson

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New En

~ Benjamin Franklin

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

~ Jim Butcher

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

~ Jodi Picoult

We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.

~ S.j. Watson

History written in pencil is easily erased, but crayon is forever.

~ Emilie Autumn

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

~ Thomas Paine

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

~ Khaled Hosseini

Vane grabbed me. “DuLac, let’s ch

~ Priya Ardis

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

~ George Orwell

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

~ Hugo Hamilton

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

~ Susan Sontag

What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear? Why not, Papa? Because they'll take you away. Why? Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us. Who are Jewish people? You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes? Yes. Well, he's Jewish. I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license? ..... ...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?

~ Markus Zusak

Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.

~ Victor Hugo