History Quotes

Many people read History books but it takes just a few people to LEAD the cause that will shape the course of HISTORY.

~ Fela Durotoye

Great charismatic leaders don't just say what voters want to hear, they say what voters want to say.

~ C.l. Gammon

More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

We’d never talked about his parents, like he was some underwater Peter Pan.

~ Katherine Mcintyre

Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing [as a nice safe history].

~ Kate Morton

But the magic moment when he walks alone has not yet happened, and I was praying he would do it before I have to leave. Now he will take his first step without me. And every step thereafter, I know. Every step of his life, and me not there to see him walk.

~ Philippa Gregory

There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.

~ Chloe Schama

In America, I appear more simple that I am, because I was completely out of my element. It was my misfortune, not my fault, that I was born in a country which was not congenial to my desires. -1815, in a letter to her father William Patterson

~ Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, ‘I want a man, not a preening peacock!

~ Katherine Givens

The curtains were not yet drawn and with the moonlight spreading across the room, I could see clearly. I undressed and slipped a soft cotton gown over my naked body. I pulled the blanket off the foot of my bed, covered my shoulders and wa...lked out on the balcony. The cool night air blowing through my hair served as a reminder that only a hint of summer remained in this year of 1860.

~ Nancy B. Brewer

No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.

~ Victor Hugo

Sarah turned around and there standing just a few feet from her was the legend himself, and he was far from disappointing.

~ C.a. Pruit

Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)

~ Max Hastings

Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

~ Mark Fisher

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

~ Marc Bloch

Isn't better to excel in your work than wasting time on fruitless things ... after all to become the history, you have to write it.

~ Zeeshan Ahmed

As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons.

~ Harper Lee

People kill very important people to change the season in their life.

~ Allan Wesler

A goal of this book has been to tear down in some small part these barriers to understanding by attempting to shatter the “divinity of arithmetic,” through showing that even the methods, which we now take most for granted, were not given to us from on high, but were actually the result of centuries of scientific efforts on the part of our predecessors. p. 269

~ G. Arnell Williams

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another.

~ Ellsworth Huntington

Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.

~ Philippa Gregory

I have a very strong sense that we only know where we are by looking clearly at where we've come from.

~ Sara Sheridan

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are and to look where things have gone missing. And it's really in the gap - it's in the erasures - that I think the novelist can best go to work because inevitably in history in any period, we know a lot about what happened, but we may be far hazier on why it happened. And there's always the question, why did it happen the way it did? Where was the turning point?

~ Hilary Mantel

History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.

~ Julius Lester

And though history sadly doesn't credit the man who first thought of tilting a bicycle's steering axis, it is more likely to be because of feet striking the wheel than an understanding of stability.

~ Robert Penn

Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.

~ Molly Caldwell Crosby

At the age of eight, John Quincy Adams was made the man of his house while his father, John Adams, was off doing important John Adams things for America. This would be a lot of terrifying responsibility at any time in American history, but it just so happens that, when Adams was eight years old, the *Revolutionary freaking War* was happening right outside his house. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from his front porch, according to his diary, worried that he might be 'butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried ... as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of British soldiers.' I don't have the diary I kept at age eight, but I think the only things I worried about was whether or not they'd have for dogs in the school the next day and if I had the wherewithal and clarity of purpose to collect all of the Pokemon. John Q, on the other hand, guarded his house, mother, and siblings during wartime.This isn't to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could have beaten eight-year-old you in a fight, but to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could beat you *as an adult*.

~ Daniel O'brien

At the age of eight, John Quincy Adams was made the man of his house while his father, John Adams, was off doing important John Adams things for America. This would be a lot of terrifying responsibility at any time in American history, but it just so happens that, when Adams was eight years old, the *Revolutionary freaking War* was happening right outside his house. He watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from his front porch, according to his diary, worried that he might be 'butchered in cold blood, or taken and carried ... as hostages by any foraging or marauding detachment of British soldiers.' I don't have the diary I kept at age eight, but I think the only things I worried about was whether or not they'd have corndogs in school the next day and if I had the wherewithal and clarity of purpose to collect all of the Pokemon. John Q, on the other hand, guarded his house, mother, and siblings during wartime.This isn't to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could have beaten eight-year-old you in a fight, but to imply that eight-year-old John Quincy Adams could beat you *as an adult*.

~ Daniel O'brien

Despite what everyone thinks, hatred is what makes the world goes round not love. Just look at Hitler, he changed the world with his hatred so did Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t free the slaves out of love, he simply hated the Confederates so he did something to piss them off and win the war.

~ Hermione Daguin

Create history and write your own.

~ Amit Abraham

When we died, no one would know, and that fraction of a moment that was so important to who we were would be gone.

~ Kiera Cass

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.

~ Niall Ferguson

Poets must be grounded in the education of the arts, drama, history, mysticism, esotericism, and philosophy. To gain knowledge and become learned of the above is easy - read. Poets should apply this knowledge to their work, so a poet will advance to the next level, to their next phase of their emotional, psychological and spiritual development, growing in years in a short space of time, in hours or months if he or she is an avid reader. This knowledge will birth work that is not meretricious but of noble parentage.

~ Abigail George

History tells us what people do, historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

~ Guy Vanderhaeghe

Rumors are the children of truth.

~ Danny M. Cohen

I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.

~ Hilary Mantel

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

~ Lee Strauss

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

~ G. M. Trevelyan

He didn't know what he was anymore – not truly Chinese, for he had spent too long in the West, adopted too many Western ideas, but neither did he feel truly Westernised. There had been times when he had thought himself so, but a glimpse at his reflection quickly showed him the impossibility of such thoughts. No, rather, he felt suspended between two worlds, never to truly belong to either. The Yellow Papers

~ Dominique Wilson

America at a turning point! But in 1813 the United States and Nathan Jeffries may lose everything; blockaded, imprisoned, raided, massacred, Americans are feeling the wrath of British forces on land and sea. Nathan Jeffries, son of Captain William Jeffries and Quaker wife Amy, is also haunted by betrayal and a relentless, deadly enemy seeking to destroy him. Facing his own worst fears, Nathan is hunter and hunted in a violent world at war.

~ Bert J. Hubinger