Top 100 His History Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha - none of the things you'd loved.
William H Gass
#5. How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire.
Simon Greenleaf
#6. While his history of depression is compatible with suicide ... and the location and direction of the stab wounds are consistent with self-infliction, several aspects of the circumstances (as they are known at this time) are atypical of suicide and raise the possibility of homicide.
Elliott Smith
#7. His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram ... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history ... and then he was promptly ... simply ... forgotten to death.
Paddy Chayefsky
#8. Man makes his history with the one hand and "holds it up" with the other.
Djuna Barnes
#9. The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.
Fernand Leger
#10. The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.
(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)
Anatole Broyard
#11. A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#12. The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.
Don DeLillo
#14. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
Malcolm X
#15. They shared a small moment of bizarre, companionable silence -they boy who'd forgotten everything about his history, and the boy who'd never known it.
Cassandra Clare
#16. Matthew being a constant attendant on our Lord, his history is an account of what he saw and heard; and, being influenced by the Holy Spirit, his history is entitled to the utmost degree of credibility.
Adam Clarke
#17. It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.
Malcolm Forbes
#18. His-his-history!' he cried. 'I declare the Stone Age at an end. History will start from tomorrow!
Terry Pratchett
#19. We spent the next two hours holding each other, Adrian's fingers kneading his history across my skin. My vertebrae became pinpoints on the time line he lingered upon, as I kissed my questions along his shoulders and neck.
Jessica Topper
#20. Western man wrote "his" history as if it were the history of the entire human race.
John Oliver Killens
#21. Talk away. If you bore us, we have books."
With this invitation Rickie began to relate his history. The reader who has no book will be obliged to listen to it.
E. M. Forster
#22. But it's this one boy, hanging over a barre, sharing his history, who ended up here with me, in this moment, by pure fate. I wonder what it would be like to kiss him.
Jessica Calla
#23. Ser Gerold Hightower had begun his history, and Ser Barristan Selmy had continued it, but the rest Jaime Lannister would need to write for himself. He could write whatever he chose, henceforth.
Whatever he chose ...
George R R Martin
#24. Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.
Albert J. Nock
#25. The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted.
Homer
#26. He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver
#28. Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.
Washington Irving
#29. Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
Conor Cruise O'Brien
#30. Man has always tried to rewrite his history but the mind is unforgiving, more so is time" - The Monk
Shashi
#31. About two hundred or two hundred and fifty years after the death of Grettir, his history was committed to writing, and then it became fixed - nothing further was added to it, and we have his story after having travelled down over two hundred years as a tradition.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#32. I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be within and without: ... with such differences as might suit and express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history.
John Ruskin
#33. Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history.
John Henry Newman
#34. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.
Charles Darwin
#35. But you must stop playing among his ghosts
it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.
Patricia A. McKillip
#36. I describe a world with no exit, convinced that God accompanies man throughout his history .
Jacques Ellul
#37. Some people would view Jackie Robinson as a very safe African-American, a docile figure who had a tendency to try to get along with everyone, and when you look at his history, you learn that he has this fire that allows him to take this punishment but also figure out savvy ways of giving it back.
Chadwick Boseman
#38. Bourgeois political economy ... never gets to see man who is its real subject. It disregards the essence of man and his history and is thus in the profoundest sense not a 'science of people' but of non-people and of an inhuman world of objects and commodities.
Herbert Marcuse
#39. In two weeks a man could completely refashion his history; he could walk all the way to Ohio or Iowa, change his name and his accent, disappear into another life. In the woods, footprints faded, the wind rose up to disperse of clothing, flesh became grass.
Alice Hoffman
#40. Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Jacob Bronowski
#41. 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
#42. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
Thomas Pynchon
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.
Andrew Roberts
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. God in His providence hasn't called us to watch history, but to shape history by praying in His Name.
David Platt
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
David McCullough
#66. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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.
#85. 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
#86. Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.
Sharon Kay Penman
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. He could feel his father's history like ruts worn deep in the road.
Ari Berk
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