A History Quotes

#1. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

Robert Kennedy

#2. The history of colonisation is replete with tales of happy, hippy natives dancing around half-naked, taking fantastic drugs and having as much sex as they could wave a stick at.

Victor L. Machin

#3. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#4. History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.

Tansy Rayner Roberts

#5. History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.

Amit Chaudhuri

#6. There is no nation in the history that has not experienced bloodshed and murdering. We all have committed the same mistakes in a different manner.

M.F. Moonzajer

#7. I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation.

Jane Haddam

#8. I don't know where you'll find her, or what mindset she'll have, but I know one thing with unwavering certainty - that girl loves you like no woman has ever loved a man in the history of the world. She called you her heart. And I believed her.

Jewel E. Ann

#9. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99

Roger Lowenstein

#10. I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?

Mark Bradford

#11. Fashion only seems to make sense if it's rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea.

Douglas Coupland

#12. He swallows a soothing mouthful of Jim Beam and rubs at his face, trying to rub away the familiar regret, that he can't take back words that are already history, that have found their mark and already done their damage.

Caitlin R. Kiernan

#13. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.

Marie Colvin

#14. An aphorism is an extreme synthesis of thesis and antithesis, theory and practice, it's a mixture of intuition and observation, hypothesis and illusions of certainty and probability, history and stupidity.

William C. Brown

#15. The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.

Thomas Paine

#16. History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.

Frederic Harrison

#17. Boston is a very proud franchise. The NBA misses them when they are not in the mix. They, along with teams like the Knicks and 76ers are a big part of the heart, soul and history of the league.

Doug Collins

#18. History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.

Miguel De Cervantes

#19. We can always be sure of one thing - that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Christopher Hitchens

#20. I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.

Will Hobbs

#21. History will tell if we were really a good band or just a one day fly.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#22. If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#23. Religion has a checkered history, and some of it is reprehensible. An

Ravi Zacharias

#24. I'll be honest with you. I'm a little bit of a loner. It's been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what's going on with me.

Kerry Washington

#25. Macon has such a rich musical history - and the state of Georgia, as well.

Jason Aldean

#26. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?

Mary Doria Russell

#27. It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.

Lucien Febvre

#28. find it interesting that in history all one had to do to discredit a woman was label her a witch. How do we discredit a strong woman today?" The class stared back at Wilson, not understanding. And then it clicked. "You label her a bitch," I offered boldly. The

Amy Harmon

#29. War is unlike life. It's a denial of everything you learn life is. And that's why when you get finished with it, you see that if offers no lessons that can't be bettered learned in civilian life. You are exposed to horrors you would sooner forget.

Robert Graff

#30. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.

Henry Ford

#31. The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

Nick Turse

#32. When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.

Masashi Kishimoto

#33. History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education ... I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#34. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.

Paul W. Feenstra

#35. In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

Stefan Zweig

#36. By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.

Dan Brown

#37. My mother was always deeply attracted to anything medical, and I think she would have loved me to have been a doctor. My father was in the army for 21 years, came out just before I was born. There was no history of showbusiness on either side of the family, but they were completely supportive.

Lindsay Duncan

#38. History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times.

Voltaire

#39. We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

Constance Baker Motley

#40. American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.

Camille Paglia

#41. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#42. The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

Octavio Paz

#43. History - a biography of a few stout and earnest persons

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#44. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.

Andrew Roberts

#45. History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.

Mos Def

#46. Glenn Beck is offended! Glenn Beck thinks playing the Nazi card is going too far. Glenn Beck. this is a guy who uses more Swastika props and video of the Nuremberg rallies than the History Channel.

Lewis Black

#47. When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

Eugene V. Debs

#48. The history of American wars is littered with propaganda, falsehoods, a compliant media, the manipulation of patriotic sentiment - everything we've seen recently, we've seen before. Time and again.

Murray Polner

#49. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.

Clive Sinclair

#50. A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

Benjamin Hooks

#51. History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma

Aldous Huxley

#52. History is really a study of the future, not the past.

Arundhati Roy

#53. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.

S.A. Tawks

#54. I am a mystic. I believe in hearing the inaudible and touching the intangible and seeing the invisible.

Adam Clayton Powell III

#55. History is also a river.

Stephen King

#56. In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.

Niall Ferguson

#57. I didn't see it as someone who worked as hard as I did. But now that Saint Laurent is part of history, it makes me a part of history, so, yes, finally it's not such a bad thing to have been a muse.

Loulou De La Falaise

#58. Benedict and Bernard and the other true monastic peacemakers of history have been effective because they have acted from a deep source of peace within themselves, dating a context for peace. This is the contribution a Christian man or woman of peace can make.

M. Basil Pennington

#59. Grace can and does have a history.

Karl Rahner

#60. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Milan Kundera

#61. The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.

Jean Fritz

#62. God uses one whom others would have passed over without a second glance. The history of obedience to the Great Commission is full of such examples. Behind this reality is a truth that God will use any who will submit to and obey His purpose for mission in their generation.

Ross Paterson

#63. 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

#64. When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.

David McCullough

#65. If history remembers me at all, in any way, I hope it will be as a man who loved the Land of Israel and watched over it in every way he could, all his life.

Yitzhak Shamir

#66. Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War.

Breyten Breytenbach

#67. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.

Tom Stoppard

#68. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!

Rashers Tierney

#69. I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

Octavia E. Butler

#70. Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.

Manmohan Singh

#71. Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would notfollow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).

Donald Davidson

#72. We're at a point in history that whether the Internet is going to evolve in a way that's compatible with democracy and human rights is really kind of up in the air.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#73. Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I'm comfortable with the fact that I won't be around to hear it. That's a decision point only history will reach.

George W. Bush

#74. Each day is a drive through history.

Jim Morrison

#75. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United

James McBride

#76. President Bush will go down in history as the torture president. He has now defied a majority of Congress to allow the use of interrogation techniques that any reasonable observer would call torture.

Jennifer Daskal

#77. History has a way of chasing gravity just like water, feeding into other parts of itself to become something else, something larger and grander, until the one pure thing it was no longer exists.

James Anderson

#78. We can today open wide the history of their administrations and point with pride to every act, and challenge the world to point out a single act stained with injustice to the North, or with partiality to their own section.

Robert Toombs

#79. I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants, rather than from animal tissues, was a landmark in the history of medicine as well as the history of chemistry.

Gregory Petsko

#80. History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

Lord Acton

#81. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.

Barack Obama

#82. The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.

Stephen Jay Gould

#83. The word 'Sudra' which means 'Son of prostitute' should not find a place even in the history hereafter. We will not allow it to find a place in the dictionary or encycl

Periyar E.V. Ramasamy

#84. In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.

B.H. Liddell Hart

#85. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.

Ronald C. White Jr.

#86. To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history ...

Alfred Kazin

#87. The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so ... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.

Robertson Davies

#88. I do not approve of naval historians who seek out flaws in the losers' battle plans and tactics. The way to profit from history is to put oneself in the shoes of the tactical decision maker as he confronts a many-faceted problem in an atmosphere of uncertainty.

Wayne Hughes

#89. It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.

Dan Barker

#90. Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expos of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons.

Cathleen Schine

#91. Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Madison Smartt Bell

#92. The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves. That faith calls out the divinity within. You can do anything. You fail only when you do not strive sufficiently to manifest infinite power. As soon as a man or a nation loses faith, death comes.

Swami Vivekananda

#93. 'The Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.

Adam Mansbach

#94. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

Henry Kissinger

#95. I had a place to go to university; I was going to study history. I was in New York doing 'Arcadia,' and I suddenly thought, 'It feels a bit weird to go from a New York stage to Manchester University.' It didn't quite feel right.

Bel Powley

#96. I just think the David O. Selznick story is one of the great, epic stories of Hollywood history that nobody knows. Maybe one of the reasons why nobody knows it is because he wasn't a movie star.

Karina Longworth

#97. I'll let a mystery gas out of my blistery ass
Just to disrupt the misery of history class.

MC Paul Barman

#98. 'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Christopher Hitchens

#99. Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Gina Barreca

#100. 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