History Quotes

There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.

~ Will Durst

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

~ Richard M. Nixon

World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.

~ Ken Follett

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

~ Jon Meacham

We've persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people - a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it's time to turn the page.

~ Barack Obama

After two world wars, the collapse of fascism, nazism, communism and colonialism and the end of the cold war, humanity has entered a new phase of its history.

~ Hans Küng

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

~ Rand Paul

As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.

~ Martin Van Creveld

Speaking as a writer, it would be difficult to find an event in American history more dramatic and riveting than the Civil War.

~ David Zabel

Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.

~ Timothy Garton Ash

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

~ George Will

I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.

~ Benazir Bhutto

Haiti and the Dominican Republic don't just share an island, Hispaniola, but a history, one that includes all the signal events that went into creating the modern world: Columbus, conquest, genocide, slavery, imperial war, revolution, and U.S. counterinsurgencies and military occupations.

~ Greg Grandin

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

~ Leo Tolstoy

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.

~ Jonathan Sacks

I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

~ Abba Eban

As history has repeatedly proven, one trade tariff begets another, then another - until you've got a full-blown trade war. No one ever wins, and consumers always get screwed.

~ Mark Mckinnon

The story of FDR as U.S. Commander in Chief is a heroic war story of a president who had already overcome great adversity in facing polio but who went on to take the reins of our armed forces in the greatest conflagration in human history - on our behalf.

~ Nigel Hamilton

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

~ Ronald Reagan

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

~ Arthur Koestler

Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces.

~ Samuel E. Morison

There is no glory in war, yet from the blackness of its history, there emerge vivid colours of human character and courage. Those who risked their lives to help their friends.

~ Silvia Cartwright

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

~ Joe Baca

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did - or did not do - to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

~ Bono

No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.

~ Phyllis Schlafly

The Establishment center... has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster - a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation.

~ George Mcgovern

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

~ Stephen Ambrose

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

~ Anatole Broyard

Good fiction is about asserting the beauties of the world, inventing a new, positive thing. Where am I going to get that? And it should be original; it should not be cliched. So the way I looked at history was not to accuse it of failure.

~ Orhan Pamuk

When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 - which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 - we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on.

~ Karan Mahajan

You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.

~ Alexander Haig

We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.

~ Zbigniew Brzeziński

George W. Bush is history's president, a man for whom the long-term success or failure of democracy in Iraq will determine his place in history.

~ Andrew Breitbart

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

~ Rudy Giuliani

The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.

~ Michael T. Flynn

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

~ Joshua Oppenheimer

I love history, doesn't matter what era, I'm fascinated.

~ Tom Petty

I've become sort of an accidental advocate for attachment parenting, which is a style of parenting that... basically, the way mammals parent and the way people have parented for pretty much all of human history except the last 200 years or so.

~ Mayim Bialik

Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.

~ Alan Stern

I think sometimes I guess you see records, say you want to get there and use that as motivation. In a way, it's kind of cool if there is a possibility to rewrite history and be up there with the greats of Olympic history.

~ Michael Phelps