History Quotes

The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.

~ Sarah Vowell

If we truly believe in the power of cultural institutions to impact communities and engage authentically with social justice issues, if we believe in museums’ capacity to bring about social change, improve cultural awareness, and even transform the world, than we must also believe that our internal practices have an impact, and must act according to the changes we seek.

~ Monica O Montgomery

Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re 10. ... Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

He could sense in her the same spirit that ran in his veins. They were people with independent minds. They were not clerks at desks. They preferred to act. Accomplish something. They were rushing to reach the end. Such people need to be left alone. They are used to the darkness, the silence, the waiting. They belong to the same family. That of leopards.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

We look back to times past, and we mass them together, and say in such a year such and such events took place, such wars occupied that year, and during the next there was peace. Yet each year was then divided into weeks, days, minute, and slow-moving seconds, during which there were human minds to note and distinguish them, as now.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

History is full of examples of men with deep-seated grievances who embraced good causes, in part at least, to settle old scores.

~ Carl Bridenbaugh

For fourteen years Wiliam Walker alias Brown alias Shields alias Swallow alias Waldon alias Todd alias Watson had been a major irritant to British authorities on both sides of the world. To the London police he was an accomplished thief. To the colonial government in Van Diemen's Land, he was a clever and determined escaper; he had stolen one of its vessels and caused much embarrassment by making it back to England not once but twice, one of only a handful of runaways to do so. To these skills of theft and evasion must be added outstanding seamanship, a glib tongue, extraordinary resourcefulness and a capacity for leadership. Among his more admirable attributes his loyalty to his family should also not be forgotten. To the convicts of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur he was a living legend, tangible proof that escape from the island prison was possible. By any standards, he was a remarkable man...

~ Warwick Hirst

She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.

~ Brad Jensen

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.

~ Brad Jensen

History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

~ Chuck Klosterman

Should you see the light of your future, within the shadows of your present, The resilience of life dancing over vast deserts of death,Witness if you so shall, the majesty of Creation.The connectedness of All was and always will be. Entanglement? No. We call it Love.” ~ Sargon of Akkad 2345 B.C. Excerpt from Andulairah's upcoming book The Erunisis Medallion

~ Andulairah

The events might have taken place twelve centuries back, but when I closed my eyes, I could visualize many things. It made me very emotional. Later, when I grew up, I became passionate about history and started detaching it from emotional point of view and became more aware of the facts.

~ Sudha Murty

The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.p. 30

~ Danilo Kiš

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

~ Arthur Koestler

The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child's life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought significant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.

~ Daniel Black

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

~ Karl Marx

Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

How queer it was for two lovers to suddenly turn into strangers?

~ Diyar Harraz

therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.

~ Milan Kundera

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

~ I.m. Pei

Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.

~ Jonathan R. Miller

The past has come apart events are vagueingthe future is inexploitable

~ Mina Loy

Was it possible to be homesick for a soul?

~ Jessica Dotta

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,If only we could act instead of talking,We wouldn't always end up on our arse.This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,The bitch that bore him is in heat again.

~ Bertolt Brecht

Isn’t that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn’t know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it’s bigger than any one man.

~ Dexter Palmer

Corrupt and incompetent police officers have a long history of being protected by their colleagues, police internal affairs and the government.

~ Steven Magee

Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.

~ Peter J. Carroll

Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.

~ Wendy Moore

The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.

~ Justin Cronin

Part of our work as faithful Christians is to learn how to discern when, and by what means, to resist authority.

~ The Liberty Book

I know it's the belief that women should never show daring in front of men. Never be bold when men hesitate. I know flight is not the answer, even to save our lives.

~ Empress Theodora

Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter's land, Guerrero' s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.

~ John Steinbeck

Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.

~ Daron Acemoglu

I had often thought about people who lived through strange and compelling times — World War II, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement. These were periods that shaped people in some indelible way. I wondered how this moment would define us. I had never before believed that there was anything special about the era I was growing up in.

~ Aditi Khorana

Sweeping out of the inward positive reality, there is to be a positive manifestation externally. It is not just that we are dead to certain things, but we are to love God, we are to be alive to Him, we are to be in communion with Him, in this present moment of history. And we are to love men, to be alive to men as men, and to be in communication on a true personal level with men, in this present moment of history.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

When my grandchildren ask me what I did in the '42 movement [Quit India Movement] I say - I waited for it.

~ R.p. Noronha

God long ago defined what it means to do evil. It is for violations of His standards that we are to be afraid.

~ The Liberty Book