History Quotes

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

~ Anna Deavere Smith

It’s happened before. It’s all happened before. History is worth shit.

~ Larry Kramer

Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn't this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn't it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?

~ Orhan Pamuk

I want to... have fun with writing again. Enjoy my work, enjoy playing with the language and characters like a sculptor plays with clay. But there's this manic focus on numbers--how many books have you written and how many have you sold and it's all push, push, push, and no time for reflection--but at heart, books are about dreaming... which is just the opposite. So I don't know... M.M. Bennetts comment to Nancy Bilyeau as related in Nancy's tribute M.M. Bennetts: The Closest Friend I Never Met

~ M.m. Bennetts

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

~ Graham Swift

There lived great souls in the history of the world.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There is no replay of yesterday.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor.

~ Mary H. Eastman

History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.

~ Breyten Breytenbach

We travel to ancient times by reading history books.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Our life today is a history of tomorrow.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil...

~ K.s. Inglis

We incline to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity …

~ John Kay

Have you ever felt you were born in the wrong decade, or came just a bit too late and missed out on all the good stuff when it was in its heyday?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Third Reich was a term that was never used by Adolf Hitler. The term 'Third Reich' is used by so-called scholars and news journalists (and Wikipedia posters) to hide the fact that Hitler called his regime 'Socialism.' Scholars, journalists (and wakipedia) cite no example of Hitler ever using the term 'Third Reich.' Other writers use the terms 'Nazi' and 'Fascist' and 'Third Reich' as if Hitler tossed them around all the time. Those terms were not used as self-identifiers by the self-avowed socialist Hitler.

~ Rex Curry

Stop explaining to others, people will only understand from their level of discernment.

~ Abhysheq Shukla

But I can't rewrite history. I can only live with what's left.

~ Suzanne Young

I’m interested in connecting with readers and strangers through poetry. I want to create real intimacy with my poems. Whether I do that through pulling from my personal life or using my fantasy life—or say history, whether that history is personal history or our collective histories—what’s important is that an experience is created. An experience that will hopefully matter to people and feel real. I want my poems to move people and make them want to live their lives, however complicated and impossible those lives may be. I think a poem can speak to the life you currently live but also to the lives you’ve lived before, the ones to come and also those you’ve yet to imagine. What else can do that? Not sex or money or other people.

~ Alex Dimitrov

When the purpose of clearly exposing the differences between the Aryan and the Tamil culture, civilization, conduct and creed Thirukkural was written. I am of that firm view.

~ Periyar E.v. Ramasamy

Fear is the most prodigious enemy of our soul

~ Abhysheq Shukla

When Husni Zaim seized power from Shukri al-Quwatli on 30 March 1949, Syria's economy was a parlous state and its army had been beaten the previous November by the Israelis. Zaim knew that he needed to take action on both fronts fast. After overthrowing al-Quwatli bloodlessly, he set out to open peace talks with the Israelis and mend relations with the French via a currency agreement and an arms deal that would pave the way for renewed French influence in the former mandate. But Zaim's reign did not last long. One hundred and thirty-seven days after he had taken power, on 14 August he too was overthrown and executed.

~ James Barr

Only if we understand our past, can we move forward to a brighter future.

~ Barbara Post-Askin

Respect is reverence out of love, Fear is reverence out of hate.Choose Wisely

~ Abhysheq Shukla

My book Bamboo Walls is forever because the Djojobojo Prophecy is timeless!

~ Yvonne B Murtha

Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.

~ Sarah Vowell

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

~ Albert Camus

Anyone who wishes to destroy humanity's past, desires to destroy its future.

~ Mario J. Lucero

I want to be undone by you. I want to be the one to come to pieces in your arms, to forget there is anything in this world but the two of us.

~ Laura Andersen

Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victim hood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changes on both sides. Baron Baghdassarian

~ Elif Shafak

Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Parmenides all state or suggest that thinking the right kinds of thoughts positively transforms our relationship to our environment. If thoughts are the right kind, it is presumably because they build on the particular receptivity of human nature to true knowledge about the nature of things, knowledge that, in turn, brings the person into greater harmony with the world around him. Thought is thus a uniquely transformative encounter with reality.

~ Brooke Holmes

by the late fifth century, the identities of those excluded from full personhood—women, slaves, barbarians—are being increasingly understood in terms of the difficulty or impossibility of mastering the daemonic tendencies in their bodies, while the identities of free men grow more dependent on their capacity for keeping the body under control.

~ Brooke Holmes

Presidents make history. I'm just a tool of history.

~ Chris Weitz

Each second of every time has its own story and history to be filed.

~ Auliq Ice

Deep is the chasm between the centuries, but by bridging it a man may return home.

~ David C. Douglas

Having a body, we have seen, does not entail knowing a body. Whereas a cow automatically eats whatever grasses supply needed nutrients, people must determine for themselves what to put into their bodies, with the result that there is room to make mistakes. Mistakes arise, in part, from ignorance. Yet ignorance is not the only problem produced by this arrangement. The fact that we are not compelled by our bodies' precise needs—understood as particular kinds of food and drink, rather than food and drink tout court—allows the formation of desires that have little or nothing to do with the needs on which bodily health depends.

~ Brooke Holmes

Xenophon tells us that Socrates never neglected the body and did not praise those who did. We can imagine that it was because the physical body—volatile, unseen, and implicated in an automatized natural world—could seem so daemonic that entrusting life, both biological life and ethical life, to its dynamics could seem like ceding control of the human.

~ Brooke Holmes

I am often appalled by those who make history, but inspired by those who do not.” -Morgana le Fey/Morgana Cornwall

~ J.m. Briggs

Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.

~ Bill Maher

Sometimes even a Yes can be fatal for our Souls

~ Abhysheq Shukla

Its all about perception in life, For some One minus One = One & for some its Zero.That's the only difference.

~ Abhysheq Shukla