History Quotes

Espionage is the world's second oldest profession.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

~ Richard Rohr

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

~ Edmund Burke

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

~ J.j. Scarisbrick

The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.

~ Warren W. Wiersbe

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.

~ Megan Smolenyak

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

~ Megan Smolenyak

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

~ Bruce Catton

I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling.

~ Na'ama Yehuda

countries who have a longer past are better able see further forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future.

~ Hal Hershfield

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to provoke renegade thoughts.

~ Andrew Roberts

Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

~ Otto Von Bismarck

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

~ James D. Bradley

He had no ideal world of dead heroes, he knew little of the life of men in the past, he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

~ George Eliot

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

~ Karl Marx

Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends.

~ Leo Tolstoy

There are two sides to the life of every man: there is his individual existence which is free in proportion as his interests are abstract; and his elemental life as a unit in the human swarm, in which he must inevitably obey the laws laid down for him.

~ Leo Tolstoy

As far back as history records people thinking, thinking peoplehave been befuddled by the mysteries of life and existence.

~ Lewis N. Roe

For me, the consolation of history resides in the fact that hypothetically returning to any point in time feels like coming home.

~ Martha M. Moravec

There was some part of me that never left that house. Rather, some part of the house that wouldn't leave me.

~ Kate Morton

It’s important to honor your ancestors. Bringing in a piece of furniture or an object you’ve inherited from a loved one not only honors the person who has passed but also brings the warmth of happy memories into your home.

~ Jeffrey A. Wands

The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven.

~ Gillian Bradshaw

Gazing around, looking up at the lofty pinnacles above, which seemed to pierce the sky, looking down upon the world,--it seemed the whole world, so limitless it stretched away at her feet,--feeling that infinite unspeakable sense of nearness to Heaven, remoteness from earth which comes only on mountain heights, she drew in a long breath of delight, and cried: At last! at last, Alessandro! Here we are safe! This is freedom! This is joy!

~ Helen Hunt Jackson

There is a unique bond between the land and the people in the Crescent City. Everyone here came from somewhere else, the muddy brown current of life prying them loose from their homeland and sweeping them downstream, bumping and scraping, until they got caught by the horseshoe bend that is New Orleans. Not so much as a single pebble ‘came’ from New Orleans, any more than any of the people did. Every grain of sand, every rock, every drip of brown mud, and every single person walking, living and loving in the city is a refugee from somewhere else. But they made something unique, the people and the land, when they came together in that cohesive, magnetic, magical spot; this sediment of society made something that is not French, not Spanish, and incontrovertibly not American.

~ James Caskey

As the soil of a garden is richer and as the harvest of the garden bears healthier nourishment from the decay of leaf matter and banana peel and egg shell and human hair and chicken bone and fireplace ash, so the accumulation of death in teh ground of a city implants therein energies and powers.

~ Tim Gilmore

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

~ Hilary Mantel

We were young and thought we were invincible and we threw ourselves into the gears of history and it ground us up.

~ Ian Mcdonald

Dixon was not unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her, nor did she dislike it, it flattered her as much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his presence.

~ Elizabeth Gaskell

Our own story is even more important for us to know than history.

~ Kristin Cashore

The recurrence of a phenomenon like [Thomas] Edison is not very likely. The profound change of conditions and the ever increasing necessity of theoretical training would seem to make it impossible. He will occupy a unique and exalted position in the history of his native land, which might well be proud of his great genius and undying achievements in the interest of humanity.

~ Nikola Tesla

To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person - few love a spokesman for the despised and the damned.

~ Clarence Darrow

All of history has pointed its refining focus to your life this moment.

~ Bryant Mcgill

If your sole focus is money, you may create a successful startup. But if it's impact, you can probably create history.

~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

History proves beyond any possibility of doubt that no religion has ever given a stimulus to scientific progress comparable to that of Islam. The encouragement which learning and scientific research received from Islamic theology resulted in the splendid cultural achievements in the days of the Umayyads and Abbasids and the Arab rule in Sicily and Spain. I do not mention this in order that we might boast of those glorious memories at a time when the Islamic world has forsaken its own traditions and reverted to spiritual blindness and intellectual poverty. We have no right, in our present misery, to boast of past glories. But we must realize that it was the negligence of the Muslims and not any deficiency in the teachings of Islam that caused our present decay. Islam has never been a barrier to progress and science. It appreciates the intellectual activities of man to such a degree as to place him above the angels. No other religion ever went so far in asserting the dominance of reason and, consequently, of learning, above all other manifestations of human life.

~ Muhammad Asad

...Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems! he sighed. Who knows what's going to happen to them?

~ Paul Bowles

Your life is a screenplay, you must be the author; direct and make it a success.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

It was like being born in Germany after World War II, being from Japan after Pearl Harbor, or America after Hiroshima. History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn't change where you were from. But still, you didn't have to stay there.

~ Kami Garcia

Oh, it was 1775.” “What?” “1775. The Battle of Bunker Hill.” “Oh.” I laughed. “We learned about it the day we met,” he added. “Another red-letter day in history.

~ J.m. Richards

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

~ Ryan Lilly

God has given every man an opportunity and a chance to re-write his or her story, it is up to you to use a blunt pen or a ball point . I have chosen a ball point and this is just the beginning.

~ Bayode Ojo