History Quotes

Always do what you're afraid to do-Robert F. Kennedy

~ Evan Thomas

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.

~ Vanessa Veselka

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

~ Maurice Minnifield

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

~ Peter Carey

You see, I have been at revaluing myself in the last few days. I may have some value to historians because I have destroyed a few things. The builder of your Cathedral is forgotten even now, but I, who burned it, may be remembered for a hundred years or so. And that may mean something or other about mankind.

~ John Steinbeck

the story of liberty is a history of the limitation of a government power, not the increase of it.

~ William J. Federer

A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.

~ Irving Stone

No moment is ever isolatedWith history elsewhere, drilling its stitches.

~ Mark Jarman

A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

~ Pete Hamill

...Raleigh was later to write, after a duel the hangman was the one who bestowed the garland on the victor.

~ Raleigh Trevelyan

I cannot tell whether diamonds appeared in his eyes or mine as the shine of adoration became the icon one sees in history, a Byzantine sparkle, Medieval armor against all odds.

~ Alice Shapiro

Disregard for the past will never do us any good. Without it we cannot know truly who we are.

~ Syd Moore

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made legal. Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

~ Eric Metaxas

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

~ Tahir Shah

History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.

~ Janet Flanner

If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.

~ Robert Earl Lee

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

~ Julian Barnes

Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.

~ Beryl Smalley

The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.

~ Américo Castro

To modernize their sleeping habits, [Peter the Great] declared, 'Ladies and gentlemen of the court caught sleeping with their boots on will be instantly decapitated.

~ Bob Massie

Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?

~ Leonid Borodin

Are you in the habit of taking tea with anyone who approaches you in a foreign port?” He went on and snorted carelessly. “No wonder you were abducted so easily.

~ V.s. Carnes

History is boring, unless you see it from the right perspective. perspective is important.Corn growing in a field appears orderless, till one turns the corner and sees the rows line up. a pixelized photo is unrecognizable, till one zooms out. All the the numbers are on a combination lock but it will not open till they are in the right sequence.So it is with history - all the names, dates and places are there, but it is not until they are seen from the right perspective that lessons become clear. history is boring, until it comes into focus.

~ William J. Federer

It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.

~ Katherine Anne Porter

When I draw something, I try to build some kind of history into it. Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged. I love trying to render not just the object, but what it has been through.

~ Alan Lee

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

~ Howard Zinn

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

~ Will Durant

The Scottish sun, shocked by having its usual cloudy underpinnings stripped away, shone feverishly, embarrassed by its nakedness.

~ Stuart Haddon

The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.

~ Barbara Marciniak

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

~ Julian Barnes

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

~ Robert E. Lee

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

~ Wallace Stegner

No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.

~ Horatio Nelson

The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.

~ Eric Jay Dolin

American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtighteningand chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.

~ Eric Jay Dolin

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

~ H.g. Wells

Invisibility--there are things we can't see now, that are there, that are embedded, that it really takes time in order to be able to see. There are many ghosts that are lurking around and lingering through us that takes the technology of another generation or so in order to uncover and show what those stains and strains and perceived flaws really we're building towards

~ Lynn Hershman Leeson

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.

~ Diana Abu-Jaber

Warfare is a series of tragedies enjoined by logistics.

~ Kevin Carson

And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.This genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible… how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me.

~ N.k. Jemisin