Top 100 Historical History Quotes
#2. Wicked eyes are not a good prospect for seminary boys. They want a gentle, soft sort of wife, not a wife who looks as though she may sprout wings and carry off the young children of the village. ~Maria "Smythe
Gwenn Wright
#3. This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.
Yuval Noah Harari
#4. In my pursuit of historical ecology, I find the pleasure of reading history.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#5. History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.
Ludwig Von Mises
#6. 'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
Natasha Trethewey
#7. Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
#8. 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
#9. History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the and and lead us into that world.
Judith Geary
#10. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.
Lloyd DeMause
#11. He opened his eyes to half-cast. With a low rumble he lifted her onto his hips. "Take me to heaven, lassie. For no one but ye can cool the fire thrumming in my blood.
Amy Jarecki
#12. The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.
-Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Nancy Ordover
#13. Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
Albert Camus
#14. I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.
Alison Weir
#15. As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
Matthew Pearl
#16. Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.
Cary Carson
#17. History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The
Ludwig Von Mises
#18. All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.
Victor Cousin
#19. 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
#20. I've always been a history lover. I've spent a lot of recreational time walking around historical castles and estates, in Britain and Europe, and so I know what the real thing looks like.
Natalie Dormer
#21. You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.
Lorraine Toussaint
#22. History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
Thomas Carlyle
#23. The 16th-century theatre witnessed the particularly English manifestation of 'the history play.' There can be no doubt that Shakespeare's presentations of 'Henry V' and 'Richard III' have been incalculably more influential than any more sober historical study.
Peter Ackroyd
#24. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
Carl Lotus Becker
#25. I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life.
Vincent Piazza
#26. The thing people forget when they are looking for solutions is there is nothing final in history.
Amira Hass
#27. The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#28. To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
Octavio Paz
#29. Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.
Goldwin Smith
#30. We live in a complicated society, Bromley - one that is changing and which does indeed need to change. But do you not think any change must begin within our own family gathering?
P.J. Parker
#31. There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.
Chloe Schama
#32. History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
Bernard DeVoto
#33. Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.
Aurin Squire
#34. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.
Jodi Picoult
#35. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
T. S. Eliot
#36. Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
#37. Why would you create a movie for black people if you don't understand the history and perspective of the people you are doing it for? You need historical perspective to make sound decisions.
Tim Reid
#38. Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.
Franz Grillparzer
#39. What an exciting super-tomorrow it will be! Americans are today making the greatest scientific developments in our history. That is a promise of new levels of employment, industrial activity and human happiness.
Clarence Francis
#40. The New Testament was not written by historians with the critical spirit of a Thucydides or a Polybius, but by men moved by the fervor of faith. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that it contains discrepancies, some non historical legends, and polemics.
Marvin Perry
#41. It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.
Herbert Butterfield
#42. I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater - which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.
James Earl Jones
#43. My process for determining which eras I'd write about was to just read history books that gave a really broad overview of Chinese history. And when I came across a historical figure or a historical incident that was especially interesting to me, ideas for characters and stories would surface.
Susan Barker
#45. For whom do you cry, my son?" the Great Spirit asked.
"I do not know."
"Yes, you do.
P.J. Parker
#46. Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.
Edward Rutherfurd
#47. History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.
Alfred Kazin
#48. Even as regards Earth we are more committed to history than to geography, more committed to time than to space. History is endless. Place is limited.
Thomas Berry
#49. History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.
Abigail Adams
#50. All rising suns set, Archivist. [...] All revolutions are [fantacy, lunacy], until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. [...] I was not genomed to alter history, [...] no revolutionary ever was.
David Mitchell
#51. It's never pleasant to have one's unquestioning beliefs put in their historical context, as I know from experience, I can assure you.
Kingsley Amis
#52. Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.
Sara Gruen
#53. 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
#54. Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, 'I want a man, not a preening peacock!
Katherine Givens
#55. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#56. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#57. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#58. Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.
Geoffrey Elton
#59. As far as we can look back into history, the downfall of any nation can be traced from the moment that nation became timid about spending its best blood.
Frederick Russell Burnham
#60. Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.
Kimberly Cutter
#61. Like an unfinished symphony, her story played on my mind for most of my life. It would rock to the tune of the passage of time, an adagio of high notes, low notes an illusive movements. Then when I least expected it, I happened upon the missing notes in the life of Charlotte Howe Taylor.
Sally Armstrong
#62. Rainbow Cloud strode forward like a hunting cat with the same strength of height and broad shoulders, the same rolling gait as First Light's father. They were indeed the same man, split in two at birth, so the family might be rewarded by twice the skill in hunting each brother possessed.
P.J. Parker
#63. Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet?
P.J. Parker
#64. you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, "a distillation of rumor," or, as Napoleon said, "a set of lies generally agreed upon
James Alexander Thom
#65. Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than the "historical exponential" view.
Ray Kurzweil
#66. Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
C.V. Wedgwood
#67. I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
William Gibson
#68. The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.
Geza Vermes
#69. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
#70. The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.
Octavio Paz
#71. With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
Andrew Roberts
#72. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#73. 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
#74. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
John Dominic Crossan
#75. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.
P.J. Parker
#76. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.
Guy Vanderhaeghe
#77. Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.
Vijay Seshadri
#78. 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
#79. History : You may only be a House of Royals
without any Historical Tricks to Regain it.
The Religion Of The Blue Circle
Religious Leader Petra Cecilia Maria Hermans
October 31, 2016
Petra Hermans
#80. There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.
Gaston Bachelard
#81. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#82. He who travels west travels not only with the sun but with history.
Hal Borland
#83. 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
#84. I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.
Francis Fukuyama
#85. The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.
Thomas Paine
#86. One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.
Thomas Jefferson
#87. I don't look at myself as a historical icon, but the reality of it is, yeah, I am playing for history now.
Pete Sampras
#89. I like you and your book, ingenious Hone! In whose capacious all-embracing leaves The very marrow of tradition 's shown; And all that history, much that fiction weaves.
Charles Lamb
#90. Jewish history is never simply about the Jews, but always about their relationship with the rest of society.
Abigail Green
#91. History tends to take the simplest possible view. As soon as you start to scratch the surface of any historical event, it starts to become more and more complicated, which is not the stuff of Hollywood films. Complications tend to break down the budget.
Christopher McQuarrie
#92. We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.
Daisaku Ikeda
#93. I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.
Shekhar Kapur
#94. The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#95. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.
P.J. Parker
#96. Before the battle they had been discussing whether there might be life after death, and Windham and Rochester had made a pact that if there was, the first to die would come back and tell the other. But, said Rochester, he [Windham] never did.
Jenny Uglow
#97. History immortalises both the names of the greats and the tyrants without making a distinction between them.
Aziz Hamza
#98. What I have learned from studying counterfactual history is that the law of unintended consequences always kicks in no matter how secure you are in your plan. We have to live with the historical record as it is, like it or not.
Gavriel David Rosenfeld
#99. 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
#100. You are charismatic. Men are drawn to you. I am drawn to you. And by your size, let alone your skill with weapons, they will be in awe of you.
Amy Jarecki
