His History Quotes

#1. Environmental history ... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat ... The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.

Roderick Nash

#2. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.

Thomas Pynchon

#3. There are some days when history is made. Yesterday was one - and I was honoured to be in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in. During his soaring inaugural address, the new president gazed over a teeming National Mall that was crowded with more than a million people.

Des Browne

#4. The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#5. We don't know anything about Scottish history. All we know is that an American guy painted his face blue and somehow they won.

Greg Proops

#6. He shot everything that moved in a blind fury. It was as if he were floating outside his body, his flesh acting on pure animal instinct. To kill or be killed. It was exhilarating.

Rebecca M. Gibson

#7. 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

#8. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.

George R R Martin

#9. God has given every man an opportunity and a chance to re-write his or her story; it is up to you to use a blunt pen or a ball point . I have chosen a ball point and this is just the beginning.

Bayode Ojo

#10. The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ...

A.S. Byatt

#11. The 1850s proved to be the decade of the most prolific patent litigation in America's history. Lincoln himself was involved, as well as his most three prolific cabinet members: Chase, Seward and Stanton.

Darin Gibby

#12. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.

A.E. Samaan

#13. Two famous happy warriors - Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.

Monica Crowley

#14. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Erik Larson

#15. As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.

Lady Gregory

#16. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Haruki Murakami

#17. Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.

Abraham Lincoln

#18. Roger Goodell makes $40 million a year, which more than compensates him for the most difficult and sensitive decision in his nine years as commissioner: How hard to come down on Tom Brady, the best quarterback in NFL history, who Goodell told me last year is a "great ambassador for the game"

Gary Myers

#19. The monster has escaped Elba!" "The tyrant has landed at Cannes!" "Bonaparte meets the troops." "Napoleon approaches Paris." "His Imperial Majesty has entered the capital.

David Frum

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

Andrew Roberts

#21. The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.

Benjamin Tucker

#22. Mournier defined his own position as one of 'tragic optimism
' a Christian attitude of absolute engagement in the struggles of history, despite the fact that the Absolute cannot be contained in history.

Robert Ellsberg

#23. God in His providence hasn't called us to watch history, but to shape history by praying in His Name.

David Platt

#24. The critic's first labor is the task of distinguishing between men, as history and their works display them, and the ideals which one and another have conspired to urge upon his acceptance.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

#25. When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.

William Howard Taft

#26. Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.

David McCullough

#27. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

Baron De Montesquieu

#28. I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me'.

Elizabeth Kostova

#29. I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.

Gerard Donovan

#30. Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#31. Who was Vardan Mamikonian, and how did he come to play this most crucial role in Armenian history? It may justifiably be said that without his committed leadership, the term "Armenian" today might have referred to no more than an obscure, one-time, Christian people of long past.

Arra Avakian

#32. While Frazier was a man of few words / Ali was a world of mouth / but he found his place in history / Now his heart can express him well / Joe Frazier was a silent warrior / whom Ali silently admired / One could not rise without the other

Muhammad Ali

#33. 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

#34. I care about Roger Sterling, one of the most subtle and amazing characters in dramatic history [Mad men]. This guys who knows precisely who he is, yet leaves us time after time hoping desperately for him to finally grab control of his life and some responsibility for those around him.

Chris Matthews

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.

Will Durant

#38. God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world.

John Gresham Machen

#39. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn't his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn't this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?

Tara Conklin

#40. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.

Bjornstjerne Bjornson

#41. There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history.

Peter Singer

#42. The greatest films ever made in our history were cut on film, and I'm tenaciously hanging on to the process. I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor wearing mini-strands of film around his neck.

Steven Spielberg

#43. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?

Philip Yancey

#44. 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

#45. 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.

#46. Violence is the most elemental truth of life. It's the central shaper of history, the ultimate determiner of whether A or B is going to get his way.

James Carlos Blake

#47. Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.

Sharon Kay Penman

#48. It's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.

Scarlett Johansson

#49. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

Nina Jacobson

#50. Thus even the most wretched individual breaths like a leaf in a verdant forest. His national identity supported him. A revered history receives him. A legitimate culture accepts his voice into the choir of a great community.

Theodor Lessing

#51. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

Daniel J. Boorstin

#52. They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men.

Bernard Malamud

#53. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

Chris Marker

#54. I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

Romain Gary

#55. A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.

George Mikes

#56. With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before - simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.

Sol Luckman

#57. Jesus is the purest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the pure, who, with his pierced hand has raised empires from their foundations, turned the stream of history from its old channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages

Jean Paul

#58. He was a man's man, despite his vocation; after all, he studied American history. A litany of red-blooded patriots, fighting savages and redcoats alike, taming the wilderness, proving their worth with bulging sinews and roaring guns.

Jordan L. Hawk

#59. Washington's address is virtually unknown today and has not been seen in most American history textbooks in nearly four decades. Perhaps it is because of all the religious warnings Washington made in his 'Farewell Address.'

David Barton

#60. Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.

Albert Schweitzer

#61. He could feel his father's history like ruts worn deep in the road.

Ari Berk

#62. The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher's eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner's lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.

Anna Myers

#63. The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own without simply creating him anew

Bart D. Ehrman

#64. Man is essentially the imitative animal. His whole educabilityand in fact the whole history of civilization depend on this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, and acquisitiveness reinforce.

William James

#65. All that is observable in a man-that is to say his actions and such of his spiritual existence as can be deduced from his actions-falls into the domain of history.

E. M. Forster

#66. His [Gen. Douglas MacArthurs] twenty-two medals-thirteen of them for heroism-probably exceeded those of any other figure in American history. He seemed to seek death on battlefields.

William Manchester

#67. No tyrant, however evil, has yet lacked ready hands to execute his most abominable will. To read how eagerly men have rushed to serve the despot is the bitterest, the saddest matter of history; it is the saddest sight in our own day.

Richard Jefferies

#68. Only in a secular history where men and women are freed for unexpected true humanity can God reveal his own being.

Edward Schillebeeckx

#69. No one can compare to Ronaldinho. I remember his plays, his dribbles. I remember him winning every title at the Camp Nou. He made history at Barca, he made history with Brazil and he's still making history.

Neymar

#70. As the centuries pass, the evidence is accumulating that, measured by His effect on history, Jesus is the most influential life ever lived on this planet.

Kenneth Scott Latourette

#71. When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.

Laura Hillenbrand

#72. David Stern might be the smartest executive in the history of professional sports. His obsession with the Vagrant Kings is one of the strangest stories.

R.E. Graswich

#73. In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

C. Wright Mills

#74. I joke with my kids, who love history, that I'll be the only governor to be elected twice in his first term.

Scott Walker

#75. She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#76. His voice was soft but deep, and it sounded like history.

Jason Miller

#77. Man is brilliant at solving problems; but solving them only makes him the victim of his own childishness and laziness. It is this recognition that has made almost every major philosopher in history a pessimist.

Colin Wilson

#78. We'd never talked about his parents, like he was some underwater Peter Pan.

Katherine McIntyre

#79. History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Hilary Mantel

#80. For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King's side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin's memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love.

Barack Obama

#81. (P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.

Ralph Raico

#82. 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

#83. We have such a long history that when I look into his eyes that's all I can see. I forget the stupidity of what we've done and who could get hurt. I just remember the man who loved me once

K.A. Linde

#84. The history of mankind before his birth must be viewed as a preparation for his coming, and the history after his birth as a gradual diffusion of his spirit and progress of his kingdom.

Philip Schaff

#85. He found his irritation that the American memory could be short.

James Carl Nelson

#86. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.

Eric Metaxas

#87. Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different.

Gordon Brown

#88. Finally learning his baseball history, on the topic of Hank Aaron and his home run record

Alfonso Soriano

#89. He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

Lech Walesa

#90. The sufficiency of Scripture means that Scripture contained all the words of God he intended his people to have at each stage of redemptive history, and that it now contains all the words of God we need for salvation, for trusting him perfectly, and for obeying him perfectly.

Wayne Grudem

#91. The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.

Ernst Junger

#92. Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, ... We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history or the world - or make it the last.

John F. Kennedy

#93. The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.

Neil Gaiman

#94. Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.

Elbert Hubbard

#95. Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants.

Michael Lewis

#96. High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ...

Milan Kundera

#97. Part of the problem is voters know relatively little about Romney. And some of what they know about him complicates his task: Romney has a history of flip-flopping on issues, he's extraordinarily wealthy, and he can be tone-deaf about what moves voters. He just doesn't seem comfortable in his skin.

Ron Fournier

#98. We did an album one time called White Mansions, about the civil war, but it was written by a guy from England. His looking at it from over there and it not being a part of his history made it so he could be objective.

Waylon Jennings

#99. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#100. I was a bike rider, a photographer and a history student, probably in that order. (On his early years)

Danny Lyon