Top 100 Bad History Quotes
#1. Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Peter Greenaway
#2. Indeed, scientific truth by consensus has had a uniformly bad history.
David Douglass
#3. For some reason, I grew up generally believing that Japan and Korea were quite friendly. I do know that there is some bad history and the extremists on both sides are unreasonable.
Joichi Ito
#4. The 'wall of separation between church and state' is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
William Rehnquist
#5. If people really want to know and learn from history, why do they want bad history? Why don't they want good history? Wouldn't you rather know the truth, rather than the legend?
Alison Weir
#7. Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.
Robert M. Utley
#8. We are set to make very bad history.
Tom Wilson
#9. We have said that Israel has had a very bad history with the United Nations, and whoever cares for himself in Israel distances himself from that Organization.
Yitzhak Shamir
#10. Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies.
Adam Davidson
#11. That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.
Michael Crichton
#12. There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.
Diarmaid MacCulloch
#13. The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
James W. Loewen
#14. A pure democracy is generally a very bad government, It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.
Noah Webster
#15. 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
#16. Mention the name George W. Bush in mixed company, and you're likely to spark a lot of debate and emotion - hot and cold, good and bad. Not a lot of neutral reaction. He was elected in the most controversial contest in American electoral history and governed during one of the most tumultuous decades.
Mark McKinnon
#17. SMALL BOY: Where do animals go when they die? SMALL GIRL: All good animals go to heaven, but the bad ones go to the Natural History Museum. - Caption to a drawing by E.H. Shepard, PUNCH, 1929 SIMON
Sarah R. Shaber
#18. 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
#19. Children don't heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history. Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.
Albert Einstein
#20. Everything bad happens to set up something good. I've always found that to be true. I think if most folks look back on the history of their lives, they'll see that.
John Sharp
#21. Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".
David Stewart
#22. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.
Steven D. Levitt
#23. History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.
Mario Van Peebles
#24. I feel like 45. I don't look bad for someone my age, with my history of illnesses and operations and all those anesthetics. When they knock you out, it gives you time to catch up on your beauty sleep.
Elizabeth Taylor
#25. We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?
John Guare
#26. What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due to the knowledge of our history - have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs.
Margaret Atwood
#27. As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.
Thomas Paine
#28. History was full of the bones of good men who'd followed bad orders in the hope that they could soften the blow. Oh, yes, there were worse things they could do, but most of them began right where they started following bad orders.
Terry Pratchett
#29. You have to be a little bad to make history.
Brent Weeks
#30. Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
Philippa Gregory
#31. All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess. Look, being a lame flunky for a batshit crazy person isn't all that bad. Stay alive long enough and you may sneak your way to Washington!
Martin Van Buren
#32. In this country, we were not into detail. Europe developed detail." "Why do you think that is?" "Weather. The whole history of England consists of finding things to do out of the weather. Which tells you why Russia was even worse. That's why Russian novels have 182 characters: bad weather.
Ken Jennings
#33. I don't doubt myself ever, but people that don't know me do. I've been playing for 15 years, and have the most playoffs wins in Wings history for a reason, and not because I'm a bad goalie.
Chris Osgood
#34. No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.
Anastasia Griffith
#36. Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.
John Lydon
#37. There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent, powerful player in each of our lives, and in human history as well.
Jeff Greenfield
#38. The more I travel, the more I see how important it is to each population to see that their history of the good and the bad is remembered by others.
Shane Claiborne
#39. If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.
Hilary Mantel
#40. I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. To bad I drew my mistakes in ink.
Emery Lord
#41. Leave No Trace (bad language)
Sometimes she will speak of him as present, sometimes as past, and sometimes as always. That is how it should be. No one needs rescuing from her own story of the truth and no one needs to side step her history. p270
Hannah Nyala
#42. If history records good things about good people, the thoughtful hearer is encouraged to imitate what is good; or if it records the evil of wicked people, the godly listener or reader is encouraged to avoid all that is sinful and bad, and to do what he knows to be good and pleasing to God.
Venerable Bede
#43. Because for every girl in the history of girls there is always that one guy she can't seem to shake. Even though she knows he's not just bad for her but probably the worst thing.
Laekan Zea Kemp
#44. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#45. History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad.
Bret Easton Ellis
#46. Tonight, history was going to be made. And it wasn't the discovery-of-radium, first-man-on-the-moon happy kind of history. It was the Spanish-Inquisition, here-comes-the-Hindenburg bad kind of history.
Eoin Colfer
#47. The science-fictional motif of lethal, infectious information - bad memes - is a fascinating one, with an extended history. One of the earliest instances is Robert W. Chambers's 'The King in Yellow' from 1895. Chambers's conceit is a malevolent play: read beyond Act II, and you go mad.
Paul Di Filippo
#48. History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
Thomas Jefferson
#49. I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.
Glen Cook
#50. History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
C.S. Lewis
#51. Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government can't make it worse.
Henry Morgenthau Jr.
#52. History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
Tony Judt
#53. the only failure that cannot be excused is the failure to act on an injustice or to right a wrong. Those are the failures history shuns because the people who stand by and allow evil to occur are very nearly as bad as the evil-doers themselves." Archer
April White
#55. Even the great bad guys in cinema history, they're likable.
Balthazar Getty
#56. [A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it's a good plan.
Adam Gopnik
#57. I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Salman Rushdie
#58. History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.
Thomas Jefferson
#59. I just want to hear the true voices of women self-expressing - smart ones, stupid ones, ugly ones, beautiful ones, good ones, bad ones, fat ones, thin ones, all of it - until the profound silence that has resounded throughout history is filled with a healthy chorus coming from our side of the aisle.
Liz Phair
#60. That the world is in a bad shape is undeniable, but there is not the faintest reason in history to suppose that Christianity offers a way out.
Bertrand Russell
#61. Empowered Women 101: The moment you ignore bad behavior, in order to win a person's affection you have not won anything, but a person that has behavioral problems. If you couldn't fix their behavior before you won him, why could you fix him now?
Shannon L. Alder
#62. I think when somebody goes to the movies and they spend their money and they take the girl out, the family, they want to have a good time. You don't always want to be hit over the head with history or how bad society is.
Ice Cube
#64. I thought: This is not good.
I though: I am not bad at kissing. Not at bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.
John Green
#65. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
John Waters
#66. I am a Scorpio, and playing the seductress appeals to me. There are a lot of women throughout film history, like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West - those are the women I was always attracted to. The bad girls.
Chloe Sevigny
#67. We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#68. After the Simpson trial, after all the bad things Cochran was claiming, I became the most investigated officer in the history of the LAPD.
Mark Fuhrman
#69. The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them.
Ernesto Sabato
#70. Throughout history the conquerors have always treated the conquered this way. The bad ones need to believe we're inferior to justify the way they treat us. If they only could realize that we're all the same.
Michelle Cohen Corasanti
#71. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
John Stuart Mill
#72. To be a Pole does not mean just to speak Polish or to feel close to other Poles, but to value the Polish nation above all else ... [A Pole] must accept everything Polish, both good and bad, and must accept every period of the nation's history, both strong and weak.
Roman Dmowski
#73. It is the responsibility of good people to rise against bad rulers.
Abram Gitspof
#74. We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.
Chuck Palahniuk
#75. For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we'll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don't live on or work is a bad idea too.
Dennis Vickers
#76. New Rule: If you married a manic-depressive, three of your children died, and while you were president civil war broke out and someone shot you in the head, your coin really shouldn't say, In God We Trust.
Bill Maher
#77. One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.
Stephen R. Prothero
#78. History is littered with bad and heretical "biblical" doctrines "discovered" by those who thought they did not need the community of God's people in order to understand biblical doctrine.
Anonymous
#79. History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.
Nicholson Baker
#80. The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened ... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.
Genevieve Gorder
#81. Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.
Scott Pelley
#82. Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we are willing to admit that we usually follow the lead of the bad guys.
Yuval Noah Harari
#83. I did not say history was bunk. It was bunk to me . I did not need it very bad.
Henry Ford
#84. Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.
Donna Tartt
#85. History is fickle. We know that. The good and bad come around and go around, and go around again. There are recessions and depressions and economic boom and bust.
Rachel Nichols
#86. There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway.
Kristen McKee
#87. Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked.
Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.
Joe Hill
#89. Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.
Charles Stross
#90. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.
Moby
#92. As I looked around the room at all these people-my family-excitement thrummed through me. Yes, this might go down in history as the stupidest thing I'd ever done, but it felt so good to have a plan that I didn't care if it was a bad one.
Rachel Hawkins
#93. Without the connotation good or bad, bin Laden's a great man in the sense that he's influenced the course of history.
Michael Scheuer
#94. Maybe that's what history is, you go from one I can't believe it the next. And sometimes the I can't believe its are good, and sometimes they're bad. But the sum total of positive ones always outweighs the negative ones.
David Levithan
#95. 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
#96. There's a long history of all kinds of cop films ... But all these films are really about the same thing: the good guys triumphing over the bad guys.
Bruce Willis
#97. Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail
John Ashbery
#98. It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
Neville Chamberlain
#99. Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.
Camille Paglia
#100. History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King Jr.
