Top 100 Facts History Quotes
#1. When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.
Quin Hillyer
#2. Do not feel trapped by the facts of your history. Your history is not some set of sacred facts. History is an interpretation, and your history is yours to interpret. To know the history and then reinterpret it gives you additional depth.
Harriet Rubin
#3. As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...
Stefan Zweig
#4. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) ...
John Ashbery
#5. I, indeed, following the true law of history, have never set down any fact that I have not learned from trustworthy speakers or writers.
William Of Malmesbury
#6. History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishmonger's slab. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.
Edward Hallett Carr
#7. I put the truth out there, I put the historical facts into Hip Hop to show us how much history repeats itself and that if we truly want to evolve as a human race, we need to stop sticking each other in ridiculous categories.
Immortal Technique
#8. Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
#9. All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.
Mark Twain
#10. The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.
Robert Fulghum
#11. Anyone who studies the history of American commerce or warfare should be interested in Burning Springs, nicknamed "Oiltown." This was the site of the first oil well in West Virginia, drilled in 1860, just one year after the nation's first well was opened in Pennsylvania.
Clint Johnson
#12. The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
Ernst Mayr
#13. In the Bible, we have the facts and history of man's redemption. Incidentally or essentially, other worlds and other beings are brought prominently on the stage of redemption purposes and plans.
Edward McKendree Bounds
#14. History isn't written by the winners - it's written by everyone - it's a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one can argue with ...
Brad Meltzer
#15. The power that comes from knowing the facts of history is dwarfed by the power that comes from being able to shape the stories about how that history is written and told.
Annie Leonard
#17. History is often made and buttressed by myths and folklore rather than facts.
Daikichi Irokawa
#18. The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.
Steven Pinker
#19. The most surprising fact that people do not know about breast cancer is that about 80% of women diagnosed with breast cancer do not have a single relative with breast cancer. Much more than just family history and inherited genes factor into the breast cancer equation.
Kristi Funk
#20. History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.
Sarah Churchwell
#21. My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history.
Martin Kippenberger
#22. In other words, that works of history are mere collections of facts. It is fiction alone that can show us the true nature of human beings
Daisaku Ikeda
#23. At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
Mike Jay
#24. truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it's considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.
Svetlana Alexievich
#25. "The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
Tom Stoppard
#26. At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#27. The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#28. That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#29. After the Volcker Fund collapsed, I got another grant from the Lilly Endowment to do a history of the U.S., which I worked on from 1962-66. The original idea was to take the regular facts and put a libertarian assessment on everything.
Murray Rothbard
#30. The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases - or ever has released at any moment in History - a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day - and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#31. You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and [the problem's] past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it.
Mao Zedong
#33. A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.
Allen Johnson
#35. If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.
Shlomo Sand
#36. There is no room in History for conjecture. History is fact because it deals with facts, you'll learn in time ... '
'Fuck that, man. That's like saying botany is a lettuce because it deals with lettuces.
D.L. Christopher
#37. History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
Joseph Joubert
#38. It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
#39. So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.
Kathryn Harrison
#41. But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
Richard Owen
#42. write a history, we must know more than mere facts. Human nature, viewed under an introduction of extended experience, is the best help to the criticism of human history.
Homer
#43. My subject is History of Magic," he said in his dry, wheezy voice. "I deal with facts, Miss Granger, not myths and legends." He
J.K. Rowling
#44. I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.
David Levering Lewis
#45. One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.
David Frum
#46. There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.
Charlie Chaplin
#47. It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history
Margaret Beckett
#48. But the involuntary tricks of memory and the voluntary ones of imagination make always such terrible havoc of facts that truth, be it ever so much sought and cared for, appears in history and biography only in a more or less disfigured condition.
Frederick Niecks
#49. This cannot be stated too strongly: From the very beginning, Christianity tied itself to history. The most important claims of Christianity are historical claims, and on the facts of history the Christian religion must stand or fall.
Kevin DeYoung
#50. The truth is very important. No matter how negative it is, it is imperative that you learn the truth, not necessarily the facts. I mean, that, that can come, but facts can stand in front of the truth and almost obscure the truth. It is imperative that students learn the truth of our history.
Maya Angelou
#51. History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#52. My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#53. Not that anybody cares two pins about history in these days.We've got rid of history; history is all my eye. But I've got to tell you the facts.
Carter Dickson
#54. Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
Wilfrid Sheed
#55. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.
Walter Shaw Sparrow
#56. Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.
Cary Carson
#57. The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history.
Eduard Bernstein
#58. How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds
Carl Sagan
#59. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.
Mao Zedong
#60. Hip to the fact that well-behaved women rarely make history, Diane [Wilson] has already inspired a new movement of totally uncontrollable, irresistible and unreasonable women!
Medea Benjamin
#61. The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.
June Callwood
#62. If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.
Eric Metaxas
#63. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
Terence McKenna
#64. The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Ernest Renan
#65. I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
Robert Fulghum
#66. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#67. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.
Gary DeMar
#68. Culture is the most potent method of adaptation that has emerged in the evolutionary history of the living world. - Theodosius Dobzhanksky ... the 'facts' of culture history are interpretations based upon assumed culture process.
Jerry Sabloff
#69. Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.
Rachel Kushner
#70. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history, with an estimated 27 million in bondage across the globe.
Jen Lilley
#71. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
#72. Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.
John Steinbeck
#73. If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
Ronald Reagan
#74. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
#75. History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
Andrew Marr
#77. Part of history is facts. The other part is what we find easier to believe.
Walter Darby Bannard
#78. I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.
Mark Twain
#79. Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.
Isvari
#80. So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
Tacitus
#81. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
#82. A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes.
Lucien Febvre
#83. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.
Mary Ruefle
#84. Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
#85. I don't want to be a slave to history or facts. As long as I'm getting a good cursory understanding of what it is and I'm not drifting too far away at certain points, then I can play with the idea and take it anywhere I want to.
Scott Walker
#86. And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
Stacy Schiff
#87. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone De Beauvoir
#89. I'm a history major, baby. I know tons of useless facts
Elle Kennedy
#90. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
Howard Zinn
#91. My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.
C.V. Wedgwood
#92. To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.
Noam Chomsky
#93. History is a matter of interpretation, but you have to start with certain facts.
Peter Kuznick
#94. We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
William Hazlitt
#95. When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.
Philip Kitcher
#96. When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
John Rhys-Davies
#97. The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.
Ludwig Von Mises
#98. I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.
Ken Burns
#99. The America that never cared or felt guilty about portraying us as undignified people on their television screen, or in some old history book that never stated truthfully the facts of our invasion or the cruelty we had to endure for generations.
Leonard Peltier
#100. Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.
Isaac Bonewits
