History Quotes

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

~ Friedrich Schlegel

Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.

~ Sarah Dessen

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

~ Peter Hitchens

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them.(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)

~ David Mccullough

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

~ Freeman Dyson

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

~ Simon Schama

George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.

~ Helen Thomas

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

~ John William Draper

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

~ Salman Rushdie

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

~ Tom Robbins

History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.

~ Pietros Maneos

The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.

~ Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Fools who don't respect the past are doomed to repeat it.

~ Nico Robin

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

~ Roberto Bolaño

Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

~ Karl Marx

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

~ Walter Benjamin

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.

~ Woodrow Wilson

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

~ Stuart Jaffe

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

~ Edith Hamilton

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

~ Howard Zinn

It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.

~ Abraham Lincoln

AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

~ Orson Welles

The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.

~ Joan Didion

A man who could not see the end of hisprovisional existence was not able to aim at an ultimate goal in life.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

There's no crying in the rank book.

~ William Morton

Just a little off the top!- A. Boleyn

~ Robert Lynn Asprin

It is quite rare for God to provide a great man at the necessary moment to carry out some great deep, which is why when this unusual combination of circumstance does occur, history at once records the name of the chosen one and recommends him to the admiration of posterity.

~ Alexandre Dumas

I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.

~ Glen Cook

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

~ Umberto Eco

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

~ Carl Lotus Becker

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Because some things that seem unimportant now can change the course of human history -- and I am a student of human history.

~ Daniel Nayeri

Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display.What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?

~ Francine Rivers

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

~ Victor Hugo

It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.

~ Karl Pilkington

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.You want a letter from me? she asked.I told her yes.Oh, God bless you, she said.The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

~ Albert Camus

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

~ Leo Tolstoy