History Quotes

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past -- no matter how good it was.

~ Jeff Bezos

A historian is a risk-terrified prophet.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious, but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats. Our people are represented as patriotic heroes, their enemies as grasping imperialists, or subversive rebels. In other words, our national histories are propaganda, not well balanced investigation.

~ John Bagot Glubb

The line between patriot and terrorist is drawn by the historian.

~ Tit Elingtin

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

~ George Washington

Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.

~ Abdumalik Nysanbayev

The Al Saud believe they have an asset more powerful than the ballot box: they have Allah.

~ Karen Elliott House

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

~ Franz Karl Achard

The dangers of the sea should always take precedenceover the violence of the enemy’Rear-Admiral Ben Bryant CB, DSO and two bars, DSC

~ Ben Bryant

Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.

~ Nana Awere Damoah

He couldn't drive the horror of cannibalism from his brain, just as he couldn't wholly suppress a simple observation that seemed to rebut their savagery: these were the nicest man-eating barbarians a lonely wanderer could ever hope to encounter.

~ Monte Reel

Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

In Kolkata is a temple where the deity worshipped is Amitabh Bachchan. The daily aarti is performed to the chanting of the Amitabh Chaleesa. And people still ask, “Could our mythological heroes be based on actual people who once lived?

~ Ashwin Sanghi

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

~ Joanne Harris

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

~ Iris Murdoch

In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.

~ Roger D. Woodard

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

~ Sam Kean

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history, it describes the theatre of events.

~ Jean Fernel

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

~ Carl Sagan

I have always understood that money made in the patent medicine business is a practical bar to social success.

~ George Presbury Rowell

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

~ Melvil Dewey

History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man’s library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul.

~ Andrew Smith

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

~ Oscar Wilde

Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!

~ Fred Van Lente

At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what step he should next take, his power in Gabii being, by God's grace, by this time absolute. Tarquin, I suppose, was not sure of the messenger's good faith: in any case, he said not a word in reply to his question, but with a thoughtful air went out to the garden. The man followed him, and Tarquin, strolling up and down in silence, began knocking off poppy-heads with his stick. The messenger at last wearied of putting his question and waiting for the reply, so he returned to Gabii supposing his mission to have failed. He told Sextus what he had said and what he had seen his father do: the king, he declared, whether from anger, or hatred, or natural arrogance, had not uttered a single word. Sextus realized that though his father had not spoken, he had, by his action, indirectly expressed his meaning clearly enough; so he proceeded at once to act upon his murderous instructions.

~ Livy

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

~ Will Leitch

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all.

~ Arundhati Roy

The facts are always frightening, and in all of us fear of the facts is constantly at work, constantly being fuelled; but this morbid fear must not lead us to conceal the facts and so to falsify the whole of human history -- which is of course part of natural history -- and pass it on in falsified form just because it is customary to do so, when we know that all history is falsified and always transmitted in falsified form.

~ Thomas Bernhard

This moment is history.

~ J.r. Rim

This boy was likely to die soon, but he died yesterday - because of a doctor's arrogance, his unwillingness to seek a consult, his neglect to get a full and thorough history. Arrogance! We are clinicians, scientists. We observe time-honored procedures and analyses - that's how we are trained. And this is what happens when we subjugate that training to arrogance!

~ Tirumalai S. Srivatsan

Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

~ Michael Pollan

Let justice be done tho the heavens fall.

~ Michael Davitt

The most 'authoritative' accounts of a historical Jesus come from the four canonical Gospels of the Bible. Note that these Gospels did not come into the Bible as original and authoritative from the authors themselves, but rather from the influence of early church fathers, especially the most influential of them all: Irenaeus of Lyon who lived in the middle of the second century. Many heretical gospels existed by that time, but Irenaeus considered only some of them for mystical reasons. He claimed only four in number; according to Romer, 'like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures-- the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, the eagle of John.

~ Frank Butcher

As to Science, she has never sought to ally herself to civil power. She has never attempted to throw odium or inflict social ruin on any human being. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas. She presents herself unstained by cruelties and crimes. But in the Vatican—we have only to recall the Inquisition—the hands that are now raised in appeals to the 'Most Merciful' are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood!

~ John William Draper

Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

~ Alfred Adler

Why do we want to know history? Why does history form a recognized part of our liberal education? Simply because all of us, and every one of us, ought to know how we have come to be what we are, so that each generation need not start again from the same point, and toil over the same ground, but, profiting by the experience of those who came before, may advance towards higher points and nobler aims.

~ Friedrich Max Müller

The power of uncovering India’s biggest concealment is in your hands.

~ Sambhav Ratnakar

The battle of Panipat was fought for more than what is usually imagined. It was fought by a people in the far south of India, on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, for the defence of India.

~ Uday S. Kulkarni

Sometimes, in the ancient writing samples found in the Indian subcontinent, we find that a mixture of Harappan and Brahmi features has been used. This definitely points towards a continuous evolutionary process that transformed the Harappan script into the later day Brahmi. This also explains why many of the Harappan signs seem to have been simply carried forward (even in actual form) in the Brahmi script.

~ Subhajit Ganguly

Considering the fact that the Harappan script may have been proto-Brahmi, the underlying language to be expected should be Sanskrit, or proto-Sanskrit, or derivatives of Sanskrit. Many of the rules of evolution that apply to scripts are equivalently true for languages too. Like scripts, languages too render themselves to similar evolutionary inspections, as they too carry imprints of their journey down the ages.

~ Subhajit Ganguly