History Quotes

I've always considered myself to be fiercely patriotic. I love Britain - its history and the down-to-earth attitude people have.

~ Gary Numan

We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.

~ Aleksander Kwasniewski

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

~ Karl Jaspers

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

~ Michelle Obama

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

~ John Adams

That's all a man can hope for during his lifetime - to set an example - and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history.

~ William Mckinley

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

~ Grandma Moses

I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!

~ Ann Hood

No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

~ Alan Moore

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

~ Carl Jung

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

~ Richard P. Feynman

To communicate the truths of history is an act of hope for the future.

~ Daisaku Ikeda

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

~ B. H. Liddell Hart

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans.

~ Eliot Engel

Well, I'm not sure, but of one thing I am certain: History judges one differently than contemporary observers, and so I think that as time passes, I hope that not me personally so much, but our administration will be seen for some of the things that we accomplished.

~ David Dinkins

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

~ Gore Vidal

Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.

~ Jim Wallis

China, with her five thousand years of history, her vast territory and her enormous population stands like a mountain peak among the nations of the world. Her contribution to the civilization of mankind is imperishable. She has been a keen lover of peace; she has had a deep respect for international justice.

~ Chiang Kai-Shek

Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

~ Antony Beevor

I love hockey because of the respect for history and for the game itself.

~ George Vecsey

The sanctity of our battlefields, monuments, and veterans institutions is of utmost importance to preserve military history and pay respect to those who fought.

~ Henry Waxman

A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.

~ David Hume

In this respect, the history of science, like the history of all civilization, has gone through cycles.

~ Abdus Salam

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

~ Fernand Braudel

Ideas shape the course of history.

~ John Maynard Keynes

Personally, I can't see the appeal in trekking down to D.C. for a networking extravaganza, even if it is built around a special moment in American history. While I find the election of Barack Obama inspirational, I don't have a desire to memorialize it with overly effusive celebration.

~ Jamie Johnson

I think Spain will always remain inspirational, and I think French cuisine will continue to be very French and yet very relevant with its time and keep evolving. But the last thing you want for it is to become too trendy and confusing. It has too much history.

~ Daniel Boulud

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Do I feel any pressure as the most decorated Winter Olympian in American history? None at all. The only pressures that I know I face are those of how to pay it forward: How can I continually make a positive impact in people's lives, help others achieve their dreams, create their own Olympic mindset, creating champions within themselves?

~ Apolo Ohno

The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture and creed matter most, and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end - the accretion of power by one's own kind to achieve one's own dreams.

~ Pat Buchanan

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived.

~ Jon Meacham

What makes a loft authentic isn't its layout or its history but its ability to give people a true home - a dwelling that reflects their personalities and aspirations, including their dreams of urbanity.

~ Virginia Postrel

Richard Nixon had a kind of Walter Mitty fantasy life. He was a man with a grandiose thoughts: dreams of not simply being president but maybe becoming one of the truly great presidents of American history.

~ Robert Dallek

After spending 460 days as a hostage, I did emerge a fundamentally changed person. But I think, like everyone does as they grow older and probably wiser, I can look back at my earlier life - my history, my mistakes, the joy I felt as a young woman traveling the world - with some objectivity and even some humor.

~ Amanda Lindhout

I'm a Larry David fan, right? And it seems to me that Jewish history from the Talmud on has been a self-deprecating, self-critical kind of humor.

~ Peter Eisenman

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

~ Anne Lamott

Throughout history, great leaders have known the power of humor.

~ Allen Klein

Humor is so important to the American scene throughout history.

~ Bob Newhart

There's such a rich history in 'SNL' of political humor, and I think audience members expect that from us.

~ Sasheer Zamata