Top 100 Historical Quotes
#1. You can tell when a Hollywood historical film was made by looking at the eye makeup of the leading ladies, and you can tell the date of an old science fiction novel by every word on the page. Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future.
Alfred Bester
#2. It is highly probable that the bulk of the Jew's ancestors 'never' lived in Palestine 'at all,' which witnesses the power of historical assertion over fact.
H.G.Wells
#3. I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble, but there is no scriptural or historical basis for December 25th actually being the day that Jesus was born.
Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick
#4. Earth Day is the first holy day ... and is devoted to the harmony of nature ... The celebration offends no historical calendar, yet it transcends them all.
Margaret Mead
#5. For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it.
Reza Aslan
#7. By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.
Thomas Pogge
#8. Historical omission points toward a culture's subconscious beliefs that some people matter less than others.
Aurin Squire
#9. We are sitting on top of a vast cultural and historical pyramid of accumulated misconceptions, lies and myths, built one on top of the other.
Bryant McGill
#10. Superb historical romance, with a spiritual theme woven seamlessly throughout. I much enjoyed The Covered Deep and look forward to more from its author!
James Scott Bell
#11. In my opinion the best writer of historical novels. He makes you feel, smell, see every thing he describes in all his books. He doesn't only write, he makes you linked images in your mind with his words.
Edward Rutherfurd
#12. Fifth, the redemptive-historical significance of marriage as a divine symbol in the Bible only works if the marital couple is a complementary pair.
Kevin DeYoung
#13. I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.
William Monahan
#14. Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.
Josh McDowell
#15. Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#16. Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American.
Clare Boothe Luce
#17. All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.
Bertrand Russell
#18. Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.
Daniel S. Loeb
#19. I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.
Alfonso Cuaron
#20. My second novel, 'The Luminaries,' is set in the New Zealand gold rushes of the 1860s, though it's not really a historical novel in the conventional sense. So far, I've been describing it as 'an astrological murder mystery.'
Eleanor Catton
#21. The Society for the Protection of Historical Buildings was the official body whose task it was to oversee repairs and maintenance to our beloved but battered listed building. We had them on speed-dial. They had us on their black list.
Jodi Taylor
#22. That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.
Edward St. Aubyn
#23. When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.
Louis Sullivan
#24. 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
#25. The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
#26. 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
#27. It is a historical error for those who were not there to just refer to August 28th as 'I Have a Dream' speech day. That is a real disservice to those who were there. It was a sad day. It was not a celebration environment.
Jesse Jackson
#28. As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.
Jill Lepore
#29. Every Jewish holiday has a religious significance, a historical significance, and a relevance to the time of year in the natural calendar of the seasons and trees and growing things, as well as a personal significance. So you are always looking backward, outward, inward and forward.
Marge Piercy
#30. 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
#31. The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.
Philip Schaff
#32. Modern Armenia survived only because it was the single province controlled, and protected, by the Russian Empire. The rest of the territory within its historical borders is almost wholly devoid of ethnic Armenians.
John Shimkus
#33. With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.
Samuel E. Morison
#34. To secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it.
Winston Churchill
#35. [The] subjective [historical] element in geologic studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists: one considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.
Reinout Willem Van Bemmelen
#36. Thus historical descriptions are necessarily ordered by the present state of knowledge, they increase with every transformation and never cease, in turn, to break with themselves
Michel Foucault
#37. It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.
Ibrahim Babangida
#38. True counselors of despair are those who hope against hope - and historical experience - that the government can and will act constructively.
Robert Higgs
#39. And it is always the victors who write the historical narrative.
Camilla Lackberg
#40. Archbishop James Ussher of the Church of Ireland made a careful study of the Bible and other historical sources and concluded, in a hefty tome called Annals of the Old Testament, that the Earth had been created at midday on 23 October 4004 BC, an assertion
Bill Bryson
#41. Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.
Ruth Benedict
#42. Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.
Joseph Boyden
#43. Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
Albert Camus
#44. Most readers of historical fiction are content to just get caught up in a good story, and that is what I want to do as an author. I am not concerned with people knowing exactly what I made up and what is real.
Melanie Benjamin
#45. The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.
Hilary Mantel
#46. In the Godhead all historical inequalities are finally transcended.
Thomas C. Oden
#47. Overall, I adhere to the one guiding rule any author writing historical fiction should follow: whatever you describe has to be possible. It may not be common, obvious, or even all that probable, but it absolutely has to be possible.
Stephanie Laurens
#48. While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.
Sara Sheridan
#49. We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.
John Landgraf
#50. Historical experience is written in iron and blood.
Mao Tse-tung
#51. The fact is that a true human privilege is based upon the anatomical privilege only in virtue of the total situation. Psychoanalysis can establish its truths only in the historical context.
Simone De Beauvoir
#52. Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.
Samuel Johnson
#53. Any theory intended to describe and analyze socio-historical reality cannot restrict itself to the human spirit and disregard the totality of human nature.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#54. I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
Brian Eno
#55. Historical figures lose their center when they become anxious over the outcome of their actions.
Huston Smith
#56. 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
#57. The success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them.
Thomas Berry
#58. What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.
Terence McKenna
#59. bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story
Jonathan Gottschall
#60. I read mostly historical fiction - lots of stuff set in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. I also liked sci-fi and fantasy: David Gemmell, Raymond E. Feist. It's a nice escape from the world. As much as I do love real-life stories, they can often make you hurt in a way I'd rather not hurt.
Henry Cavill
#61. The only real source of historical information about pre-Islamic Mecca and the circumstances of the Koran's revelation is the classical Islamic story about the religion's foundation ...
Toby Lester
#62. In 'The King's Speech,' patriotism is utterly contained within a historical moment, the third of September, 1939, where the aggressor is clear, the fight is clear, it hasn't become complicated over time.
Tom Hooper
#63. HISTORICAL SLUMMING: the act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villageslocations where time appears to have been frozen many years backso as to experience relief when one returns back to'the present'.
Douglas Coupland
#64. 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
#65. There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.
Walter Scott
#66. In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.
Umberto Eco
#67. With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.
Richard Rohr
#68. Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
Umberto Eco
#69. Another historical peculiarity of the place was the fact that its large mansions, those relics of another time, had not been reconstructed to serve as nursing homes for that vast population of comatose and the dying who were kept alive, unconscionably, through trailblazing medical invention.
John Cheever
#70. My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.
Zadie Smith
#71. September 10, 2001. A storm is brewing in New York City. A clash is about to begin. Tempers will soon rise as historical conquests and slights are remembered and renewed on the eve of this fight between ancient and embittered foes. Yes, the Boston Red Sox are playing the New York Yankees.
Hugh Howey
#72. Because of their historical theory of the "alienation of labor" (that the worker must become less and less in control of the work of his hands) the Marxist parties never fought for the man-worthy job itself.
Paul Goodman
#73. What are your historical Facts still more your biographical Wilt thou know a man by stringing-together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts
Thomas Carlyle
#74. Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.
Sidney Hook
#75. Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.
Samantha Power
#76. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is forgery.
Hannah Arendt
#77. I had never thought much of genealogy. A lot of wasted time collecting the names of the dead. Then stringing those names, like skulls upon a wire, into an entirely private and thus irrelevant narrative, lacking any historical significance. The narcissistic pastime of nostalgic bores.
Joshua Ferris
#78. If you lift the romantic element out of my plots, you still have fully formed mysteries. In the same fashion, if you pull the mystery out of a historical romance, you are left with a perfectly satisfying story.
Deanna Raybourn
#79. Relationality [is] not only [a] descriptive or historical fact of our formation, but also an ongoing normative dimension of our social and political lives, one in which we are compelled to take stock of our interdependence.
Judith Butler
#80. The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.
Gary Wolf
#81. The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the human - at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.
Thomas Berry
#82. There is no useful information contained in historical price movements of securities.
Louis Bachelier
#84. The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.
Carlos Castaneda
#85. Many of America's historical cornbreads were staple breads for people who didn't have many other options.
Jeremy Jackson
#86. For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.
Adolf Hitler
#87. Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.
George Crumb
#88. Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.
Harold Rosenberg
#89. You can never deny the immense talent, rock credibility and iconic historical contribution that Van Halen made.
Steve Vai
#90. Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.
Franz Kafka
#91. Even if (as I myself believe) almost all Hegel's doctrines are false, he still retains an importance which is not merely historical, as the best representative of a certain kind of philosophy which, in others, is less coherent and less comprehensive.
Bertrand Russell
#92. I changed my name for that piece of shit. Historical records have been altered - Amy Elliott to Amy Dunne - like it's nothing. No, he does not get to win.
Gillian Flynn
#93. Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.
Geoffrey Barraclough
#94. A good monetary policy follows inflationary expectations and not historical numbers.
Adi Godrej
#95. I don't want to disappoint too many people, but the number of interesting political, historical conversations we had, you could stick in your ear, it wasn't that many. We talked about friends, family and of course girls.
Ben Bradlee
#96. What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
#97. The next step will be for the colonists on Mars to throw off the hand of the United States. There will be this wonderful historical irony. When the people on Mars write a declaration of independence saying, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident ... ', the US will be rather pissed off
Eric Idle
#98. All the spookiness comes from giving a contemporary anachronistic sense to terms whose historical meaning is lost to us.
Frederick C. Beiser
#99. The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.
Isaiah Berlin
#100. In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.
David Novak
