Great Historical Sayings

#1. we are in one of those great historical periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don't understand the world anymore, and the past is not sufficient to explain the future

Kim S. Cameron

#2. The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

Arthur Erickson

#3. As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

Jonathan Lethem

#4. These great historical figures we admire for their conquests, their drive, their ambition, and the progress they are said to have been responsible for. But would we have not been better off as a species without them?

Adam Nevill

#5. The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

Georg Simmel

#6. Yes, Socialists should defend their country in great historical crises.

Karl Liebknecht

#7. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#8. Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#9. I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

Steven Weinberg

#10. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

Jacques Barzun

#11. To have united the purposes of an entire Nation, is the great historical achievement of the man in whose strong hands our President has placed the fate of our people.

Gustav Krupp

#12. One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations ... or emancipation of a nation or race or class ... this is the belief that somewhere ... there is a final solution.

Isaiah Berlin

#13. It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.

Jon Turteltaub

#14. A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.

Grace Lee Boggs

#15. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.

G.K. Chesterton

#16. The great thing about dealing with people about whom we have historical resources, is that if the writing needs work, there's everywhere to go to enrich it.

Colin Firth

#17. You have to be a great liar to write fiction, a real historical revisionist.

M. Pierce

#18. It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Rebecca West

#19. The early Christian historical memory was formed on three land masses -Asia, Africa and Europe. In this respect it does not differ
from textually recorded human history, which formed in the conjunction between these three great spaces. Only three, not seven.

Thomas C. Oden

#20. I am an optimist and I believe that together we shall be able now to make the right historical choice so as not to miss the great chance at the turn of centuries and millenia and make the current extremely difficult transition to a peaceful world order.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#21. One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.

Lynn Abbey

#22. Great job, you just executed Ben Franklin! - Otto Ray

Monet Polny

#23. The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.

Colleen Atwood

#24. I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed.

Irvin D. Yalom

#25. You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.

Sonia Levitin

#26. The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

Antony Beevor

#27. In my experience there are only a handful of reasons for murder ... Jealousy, vengeance, greed, fear and pleasure ... Some killers enjoy the kill ... For them it is a great game, and for the most part they are the ones I hunt.

Amanda Quick

#28. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Orna Ross

#29. Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war. Barely had he died that his empire was dismembered.

Amine Maalouf

#30. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

Steve Jobs

#31. He searched his mind for something more to say, something to take away her pain, but he could find nothing. There were no words to ease such a pain. He knew because the ache in his heart was as great as hers.

Bette Lee Crosby

#32. The writing of history is largely a diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

Frank Herbert

#33. The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

George Orwell

#34. Tattooing is historical, cultural and a great form of art but it should always be safe for both the client and the tattoo practitioner.

William Webb

#35. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.

Paulo Freire

#36. Writers are influenced by their upbringing and experiences. But they are also influenced by the writings of others, the major historical events of their times and the great public and literary figures to whom they are exposed.

Joseph Kenyon

#37. Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

Bruce Babbitt

#38. Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.

Timothy Findley

#39. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.

Shiree McCarver

#40. Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

Hu Shih

#41. Hitler's historical hero had always been Frederick the Great. [Later], under Goebbels' prompting ... Napoleon emerged ... as his model ... Frederick the Great was a man who knew when to stop [and] Napoleon did not.

Ernst Hanfstaengl

#42. Mysteries are the evidence to errors in our religious and historical precepts.

Matthew A. Petti

#43. Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Johan Huizinga

#44. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.

Philippa Gregory

#45. I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events.

Steven Pinker

#46. The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

Moses Hess

#47. Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

Samuel Johnson

#48. Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.

John P. Kotter

#49. The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.

M.C. Halliday

#50. Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

Oscar Wilde

#51. Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#52. One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

Nancy Horan

#53. If you can accomplish any great task being absorbed in it and that too without any expectations, believe me, that one act of yours will make you a "historical person".

Deep Trivedi

#54. They are being offered a narrative, an historical story whose hope of 'salvation' lies not in a flight from history but in a great convulsive change within history, a transformation in which there will be continuity with the present as well as discontinuity.

N. T. Wright

#55. I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

Rita Dove

#56. I feel a great responsibility playing a historical figure because whether they were good or bad, I feel like the person deserves a fair shake. It's like being the executor of their estate in some ways.

Vincent Piazza

#57. A great poet can give nobler and more precious gifts to his country than the greatest philanthropist or politician.

Orna Ross

#58. I have no desire to write historical anything or futuristic anything - I want to find a way to get at the essence of what it's like to be alive now. The reason why great novels from centuries ago are still great is because that's what they were doing; it's like a message from another culture.

Jonathan Dee

#59. I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.

Jessica Dotta

#60. My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form.

Timothy Leary

#61. It is of great importance for a student of Old Testament theology to notice that in every period of the discipline, the questions, methods, and possibilities in which study is cast arise from the sociointellectual climate in which the work must be done.
(p. 11)

Walter Brueggemann

#62. To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

Chris Womersley

#63. The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves - their own reflection - in the image of Jesus they have constructed.

Reza Aslan

#64. I'm not a great reader of historical fiction; it's not my favourite genre.

Mal Peet

#65. Mitterrand had a sense for symbols, and he was the first Socialist president since 1958. He wanted to show that there is historical continuity, a connection with the great figures of French history.

Francois Hollande

#66. Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

Charles Kettering

#67. I have conquered an empire but I have not been able to conquer myself

Peter The Great

#68. More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.

Eric Hobsbawm

#69. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.

P.J. Parker

#70. For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

Michael Rostovtzeff

#71. The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

Thomas Paine

#72. Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.

Lorrie Moore

#73. Now, at last, she understood her great attraction to him. Here was the companion of her spirit. Here, indeed, was love.

Anne Rouen

#74. The great man, Genghis Khan, only knew how to shoot eagles with an arrow. The past is past. To see real heroes, look around you.

Mao Tse-tung

#75. Every great day has a story and a song!

Faith Reese Martin

#76. Work as we know it now is a very recent historical development. It didn't exist before the great agricultural revolutions that made intensive farming possible about twelve thousand years ago.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#77. They were magnificent all right, with the magnificence that can only grow in the ground of great foolishness.

Orna Ross

#78. Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Karl Marx

#79. A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

Patricia Hampl

#80. Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.

Tadao Ando

#81. Post World War II America draws a great deal of interest, but the students also seem to know quite a bit about American exceptionalism and its historical roots.

Mohammad Marandi

#82. Mr. Yeats makes great poetry out of what he calls his unhappiness about me, and he is happy in that. - Maud Gonne

Orna Ross

#83. A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

Edith Hamilton

#84. And then the great music of which the world is made took him over, beyond thought, beyond control until he heard her cry his name and they fell together off the edge of the world.

Jean Gill

#85. There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.

Chester Brown

#86. In international relations, in foreign policy, a great deal has to do with historical circumstances, a great deal has to do with the sense and perception of people.

Salman Khurshid

#87. Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

#88. Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy.

George H. W. Bush

#89. The Church in contemporary America does not need more strategies, steps, or keys to the Christian life. The Church needs truth, and more specifically, the great foundational truths of historical Christianity.

Charles Leiter

#90. I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time.

Nancy B. Brewer

#91. Tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively.

Teju Cole

#92. It is surprising how many great men started out as horse thieves.

P.J. Sullivan

#93. The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

Grover Furr

#94. Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness

Walter Benjamin

#95. Presented memorial to [Constitutional Convention] committee on sufferage. Was very courteously treated. We all felt it a great day in the history of Utah. The committee informed us they had passed on W[oman] S[uffrage] being ten to five in favor.

Ruth May Fox

#96. Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

Junot Diaz

#97. It is one of the great arts of the human soul," Ezekiel said to himself.
Her hand on the door, Quincy shifted and looked back at her uncle's profile. "What is?"
"Staying with someone. Companionship is one of the great arts of the human soul.

Beth Brower

#98. We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice.

Pope Paul VI

#99. I like to write stories that read like historical fiction about great, world-changing events through the lens of a flawed protagonist.

Carol Berg

#100. I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

Scott Westerfeld