History Quotes

In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.

~ G.r. Elton

Destiny doesn't always come when it's convenient or when you think it should. It comes when you're ready, whether you know it or not.

~ Kelly Thompson

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on.

~ Rana Dasgupta

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

~ Arthur Golden

History's got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can't be untied.

~ Orson Scott Card

That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.

~ Kate Morton

So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it.

~ David Wroblewski

The trouble is, we are incurable sentimentalists. We insist on makin over historical characters to suit our preconceived notions of what they should be, chipping, sandpapering, and polishing each personality until it assumes what we consider the proper contour and color.

~ Nancy Byrd Turner

Some people like danger and adventure, some like to be free of civilization, and some like to live by their wits. It was those special people who headed west.

~ Joy Hakim

I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.

~ Julian Barnes

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.

~ Karl Marx

I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.

~ Wiley Cash

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.

~ Bill Bryson

For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

~ Raquel Cepeda

The past is a reality that exists just beyond our reach.

~ Joanna Denny

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

~ Laura Lippman

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.

~ Robert K. Massie

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

~ Nick Harkaway

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.

~ Erik Larson

People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived.

~ Aporva Kala

History remembers only the names of the conquerors. There are no pages devoted to the scruples of the losers.

~ Manjul Bajaj

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

~ China Miéville

Since the early beginning of history, India has been the Klondyke of the world

~ Virchand Gandhi

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.

~ John Sedgwick

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

~ Steven Heighton

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

~ Tom Bissell

Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.

~ Harlan Coben

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

~ Noam Chomsky

Justice is a relative concept in all ages. The fourteenth century is no exception.

~ Ian Mortimer

Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today

~ Gillian Hovell

You must train harder than the enemy who is trying to kill you. You will get all the rest you need in the grave.

~ Leon Degrelle

History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.

~ Edward Hallett Carr

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

~ Louise Erdrich

...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

~ David Willis Mccullough

When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.

~ Douglas A. Blackmon

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

~ Julian Barnes

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history

~ Gregory Maguire

Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.

~ Howard Markel