Top 71 History Alive Quotes
#1. By operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.
Gail Sheehy
#2. This is the biggest cemetery for Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti. It must tell us that we have to come back here again and again. We must keep the memory of the worst crime in human history alive for those who were born later.
Horst Kohler
#3. New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
Junot Diaz
#4. The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity ... is to an incalculable extent a history of error.
Frank Kermode
#5. Never again will we have this good a chance as we now have to find an enduring place for ourselves within the natural systems that keep us alive. It's a sweet spot in history. That's why this is such a critical time.
Sylvia Earle
#6. It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.
Simon Schama
#7. I have never in my life taken a command into battle and had the slightest desire to come out alive unless I won.
Philip Sheridan
#8. If the great figures of this nation's history were alive today, they would all have to say that they committed a felony when they applied for a job at McDonald's.
Justin King
#9. The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.
David McCullough
#10. American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.
John F. Kennedy
#11. The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#12. I was never surprised that they did not have a phoenix on display. There is only one phoenix at a time, of course, and while the Natural History Museum was filled with dead things, the phoenix is always alive.
Neil Gaiman
#13. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin
#14. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.
Shashi Tharoor
#15. I saw 'The 39 Clues' as a potential vehicle for doing some education in a fun way - to take some of these amazing stories from history, dust them off and make them alive.
Rick Riordan
#16. We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.
Benedetto Croce
#17. According to Scripture, the invisible church includes everyone who has ever been genuinely born again for every age of church history. This church will not meet in a visible way until Christ returns. The visible church consists of believers who are alive and meeting together right now.
Wayne Mack
#18. Happy-ever-after is a fairy-tale notion, not history. I know of no woman who escaped from Chelmno alive.
Jane Yolen
#19. Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.
J.J. Scarisbrick
#20. Every hundred years or so a new Grim Anoukie is made; the Parish Priest at the time picks a victim, usually someone who has pissed off the church or simply wouldn't be missed. He then buries them alive in the Virgin Grave; the rest is... history."
Nicky Peacock
"The Virgin Grave
Nicky Peacock
#21. Out of all of the trillions of years of the Earth's history, you might be alive for one 70 or 80 year period. That ain't so long. You should be out ready to burn this motherfucker to the groun' while you can. But they somehow get you all scared and hung up on these stupid ideas.
L.T. Vargus
#22. This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.
Carrie Vaughn
#23. Own your history and be who you are. To hide bits and pieces of yourself out of shame or fear is to be half-alive. To offer only half of yourself to others is to cheat them and yourself.
Margo Christie
#24. It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.
Thomas L. Friedman
#25. To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art - borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done.
Dorianne Laux
#26. ... the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun.
Andre Gide
#27. Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.
Sara Sheridan
#28. History, as they say, is alive and well and living in London.
Helene Hanff
#29. History is like a ghost. It is as dead as alive.
Kedar Joshi
#30. The Master said, "A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present."
(Analects 2.11)
Confucius
#31. The lifelong health problems of John F. Kennedy constitute one of the best-kept secrets of recent U.S. history - no surprise, because if the extent of those problems had been revealed while he was alive, his presidential ambitions would likely have been dashed.
Robert Dallek
#32. There are more American Indians alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other time in history. Does this sound like a record of genocide?
Rush Limbaugh
#33. All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive.
Gene Wolfe
#34. In the history of everyone in whom the artist-within has survived conditioning, schooling, training - there are (persons) influences that have kept him alive, awake .. who have encouraged him without even trying - just by being. They have been One's real teachers.
Frederick Franck
#35. Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.
Sara Sheridan
#36. To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.
[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
David McCullough
#37. Witnessing the Vette's demise, the way Rick felt, there wasn't a king on Earth who he would bow to. No religious figure whose hand he'd kiss. No icon of history he'd worship. No one whose autograph he'd seek. He was becoming a legend, and he was alive to feel it happen.
Rich Hoffman
#38. [I]t's guilty of the very thing that makes kids hate history as a subject when it's taught badly: The Da Vinci Code makes the past feel like a dull, grainy, faraway thing, instead of something vibrant and alive.
Stephanie Zacharek
#39. We need history, not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible.
Allan Bloom
#40. All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!
Camille Paglia
#41. I love history. I'm very interested by it and I think it's great to have a movie that brings it alive in a way. It's sort of that romanticized version of it.
Ben Stiller
#42. Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you
can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out.
Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely
critical moment in the history of our planet.
Carl Sagan
#43. I just feel like history is very much alive and important and I don't, you know, I can't worry about whether people get it or not, per se.
Greg Proops
#44. I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.
Cassandra Clare
#45. The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.
Anatol Lieven
#46. At this point in history, 1952 A.D., our lives and freedom depend largely upon the skill and imagination and courage of our managers and engineers, and I hope that God will help them to help us all stay alive and free.
Kurt Vonnegut
#47. Comforters for our todays / Guardians of memories / Keeping our youth and yesterdays alive / Comrades with one history.
Adele Faber
#48. In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.
Ted Sizer
#49. All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess. Look, being a lame flunky for a batshit crazy person isn't all that bad. Stay alive long enough and you may sneak your way to Washington!
Martin Van Buren
#50. Of babies born alive and in hospitals during that month of July 1945, 92 percent would die within then days.
Andrei Cherny
#51. Ali was the natural choice as he was the most respected Companion still alive and was related to Prophet in two ways
Firas Alkhateeb
#52. Texas history is a varied, tempestuous, and vast as the state itself. Texas yesterday is unbelievable, but no more incredible than Texas today. Today's Texas is exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive.
Edna Ferber
#53. I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#54. We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten ... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#55. Music makes me alive in a way that nothing quite does. Good art, good film, good books, good dance. Exhibitions, history. Nature makes me feel alive. Georgia in the rain - that makes me feel alive. Compassion makes me feel alive. Hard fought victories for social rights.
Emily Saliers
#56. Most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layered
will make a window out of fire. It's cold and the faces at the window
do what faces usually do they open onto a genetic history
that looks up suddenly and it's the eyes everyone says you can't say that's not alive
Cole Swensen
#57. I want to know why I'm alive. I want to understand. It's like exploration; it's like someone being interested in a place and its history, digging into the earth and looking for it, searching - it's a passion.
Juliette Binoche
#58. Darnley, who, like Banquo's ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive.
Antonia Fraser
#59. We are haunted houses of history.
Nobody that we meet ever dies while we are alive.
Stefan Molyneux
#60. Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.
Chris Crutcher
#61. One week ago I said that cloning of mammals was years away ... it is fun to be alive at this point in history.
Anders Sandberg
#62. Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead.
Maltbie Davenport Babcock
#63. You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly: radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it.
Jerry Garcia
#64. When Moses was alive, these pyramids were a thousand years old. Here began the history of architecture. Here people learned to measure time by a calendar, to plot the stars by astronomy and chart the earth by geometry. And here they developed that most awesome of all ideas - the idea of eternity.
Walter Cronkite
#65. History
Coming too close
Is monstrous, like a doll
That is alive and bigger than the child
Who tries to hold it.
Babette Deutsch
#66. If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!
G. M. Trevelyan
#68. Now, a good education is about so much more than just learning geometry or memorizing dates in history. All of that is important, but an education is also about exploring new things
discovering what makes you come alive, and then being your best at whatever you choose
Michelle Obama
#69. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
David Letterman
#70. History is nothing. It can be recycled or thrown away completely. It isn't this sacred treasure chest I mistook it to be. We were something, but history isn't enough to keep something alive forever.
Adam Silvera
#71. History is written by the victor, and if the elderly don't pass down their memories, eventually there won't be anyone else left alive who knows how the war was really fought.
Rachel Vincent
