Top 100 History Book Quotes
#1. History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.
Amit Chaudhuri
#2. 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
#3. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#4. 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
#5. Half-way through the labour of an index to this book I recalled the practice of my ten years' study of history; and realized that I had never used the index of a book fit to read.
T.E. Lawrence
#6. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#7. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#9. Yeah,there was a whole chapter on you in my eight grade History of Angels textbook," Miles said. Arriane clapped. "And they told me that book was banned!
Lauren Kate
#10. Hitler learned his eugenics from the infamous "Baur-Fischer-Lenz" book that documented American and British eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
#11. Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took.
Sam Cooke
#12. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.
A.E. Samaan
#13. 'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history!
Alison Weir
#14. The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.
Matthew Pearl
#15. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.
Miles Davis
#16. The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.
Colin Callender
#17. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.
Tommy Lapid
#18. The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.
Jean Fritz
#19. Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
Brad Jensen
#20. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.
Stephen Richards
#21. With the publication of this book we, as non-Jews, are doing our small part to stand up for the truth. So let us state unequivocally here and now: the Holocaust happened EXACTLY as per the history books. Period. Fact. No debate whatsoever.
James Morcan
#22. Sometimes people have too much history together, history of the wrong kind, and people cannot tear pages from the book of their life. Once something is written there it is permanent.
Ryan David Jahn
#23. It's terrifying the way molecular biology has become more and more jargon ridden. But I strongly believe that my book can be read by the intelligent layman. I want everyone who bought a copy of 'A Brief History of Time' to buy a copy of 'Genome'.
Matt Ridley
#24. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.
Kadir Nelson
#25. Learning from books is so empowering - whether it be from history, a novel or a poem. When you come away from reading having learned something, you yourself are bigger.
Lisa Lucas
#26. Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.
Natalie Maines
#27. Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.
Marjorie Garber
#28. 'The Pushcart War' is presented as a history of a conflict that has not yet taken place; in each edition of the book, the date on which the hostilities commenced is nudged forward.
Adam Mansbach
#29. When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.
Tom Morello
#30. 'The Man in the High Castle' was not the first alternative history novel, nor even the first Nazis-win-the-war novel, but it is still probably the most influential book in the genre.
Adrian McKinty
#31. History is written by the winners. The books say the Indians were bad guys and the whites just needed a little land. It's like, Excuse me, let me take your car. I'm discovering it. I'm putting my flag on your windshield.
Mario Van Peebles
#32. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#33. This book argues that the history of federal student loan policies is best understood as a series of messes in which attention became focused on some particular aspect of a larger problem and well-intentioned policies were devised to address each narrowly defined concern.
Joel Best
#34. As to the book called the bible, it is blasphemy to call it the Word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions and a history of bad times and bad men.
Thomas Paine
#35. I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting, I read books, I sang songs of history, And today I've come home to Cold Mountain To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.
Hanshan
#36. I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Niall Ferguson
#37. My daughter will be reading about Pat Buchanan in a history book someday, and I am hanging out fist-bumping with him and joking with him.
Willie Geist
#38. History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#39. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#41. I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
John Cleese
#42. Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book .
R.S. Thomas
#43. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#44. I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.
Imre Kertesz
#45. ... books are a very recent means of expression in the broad sweep of history, capable of changing the world and toppling tyrants.
Nina George
#46. People come from all over the world to see this little place they've seen in movies and read about in history books: Soho.
Marc Almond
#47. What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
#48. Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.
Ravi Zacharias
#49. I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.
Hailee Steinfeld
#50. Why would I talk about the past when I got a bright future? What kind of money is the past gonna make me? Everyone wants to know information. Now, if you wanna know information, if you want history, you're gonna read a history book. The past ain't gonna make you no cash.
Riff Raff
#51. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
#52. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#53. Of course we all know people who aren't cut out for college, but I know it's a mistake to think of education only as a route to a better career. Reading books, studying history - all these things contribute to making us better citizens, too.
Rebecca Mead
#54. Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain.
Ani DiFranco
#55. Well, we have nothing to hide. Our history is an open book. They may find what they are looking for, but the fact is the history of the church is clear and open and leads to faith and strength and virtues.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#56. I knew always that Holland gave away the most Jews of all the countries. We are not the heroes that are in the history books.
Carice Van Houten
#57. Cousin-screwing. It is not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book for history that there's, like, a 99.9999 percent chance that at least one of your great-great-great-grandparents married first cousin.
John Green
#58. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#59. Know your genre. Know your history. Read a book.
Brian Keene
#60. What's interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you're actually going to make history worse.
Gavriel David Rosenfeld
#61. So she [Eleanor Roosevelt] is an amazing First Lady. What other First Lady in U.S. history has ever written a book to criticize her husband's policies?
Blanche Wiesen Cook
#62. For every book that I write ... I develop a history for each person and make sure they are well rounded and flawed. You have to know everything about them from their shoe size, to where they went to school, to what their first pet was, to what they like to eat, to what they want out of life.
Jojo Moyes
#63. Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation.
William Winwood Reade
#64. I predict that this will be the greatest book ever and it will sell more than any other book in history
Muhammad Ali
#66. The Labor Party has always - always been praised as leaders. In fact, there's probably more books written about ALP leaders and the ALP people than the Libs or anyone else in Australian's history, but there was substance to it.
Warren Mundine
#67. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.
Camille Paglia
#68. In 1891 the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history; he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade; a nation-wide burning of the books.
Manu Herbstein
#69. The word 'algebra' derives from Al-Khawarizmi's book title "al-jabr", meaning "completion"; balancing both sides to find a solution
Firas Alkhateeb
#70. As the writer of a pseudonymous book, I gave up my own accumulated history as a novelist and became what I had been as a child: unnamed, unidentified, unacknowledged. Invisible. In a very real sense, what I hope for in the process of imagining a book is to disappear.
Susan Shreve
#71. When I was a teenager, I read the bible cover-to-cover, and I found the Old Testament, it's a pretty bloody history book.
Billy Bob Thornton
#72. And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.
Michael Berryman
#73. I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.
Santosh Kalwar
#74. One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man ... It is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process.
William Winwood Reade
#75. I did some stage when I was a kid, around 16 or so. I was living in Melbourne and had a band. I was quite young. We weren't very good. Then I found a band in Perth. We played around for three years. We're in the 'History of Rock'N'Roll,' a book about Perth music.
Paul Eenhoorn
#76. Your name will be in a history book one day, and some bored ten-year-old will memorize it for a test and then forget all about you. You have a job, just like everyone in the world. Stop acting like it makes you more or less than anyone else.
Kiera Cass
#77. Naval heroes are seldom immodest, but soldiers quite often are. It is said of one gallant general that publication of his book was delayed because the printer ran out of capital I's.
John Colville
#78. My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
Lynn Abbey
#79. Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#80. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.
Sally Mann
#81. The Airwitch had gone from reading nothing in his life to never stopping, buying every novel or history book he could get his hands on.
Susan Dennard
#82. That's the problem with history, we like to think it's a book - that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn't the paper it's printed on. It's memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.
Paul Beatty
#83. Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#84. 'Big Sky Mountain' is the story of Hutch Carmody and Kendra Shepherd, lovers with a history, and a lot of hurt pride. The book is about finding their way back to each other, growing as people, and inventing a life they can share.
Linda Lael Miller
#85. I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history.
Anatoli Boukreev
#86. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.
Lester Bangs
#87. Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
Jim Crace
#88. I've always been homeschooled, so doing it on set is kind of the same thing. My mom makes it very interactive - we'll get a book on chocolate and learn how to make it, or she will buy antique items. I love military history, the mechanics and strategy of it.
Atticus Shaffer
#89. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#90. The young man never seemed to know what idleness was," marveled Cutler, "and every leisure moment would find the last novel, some English classic or some abstruse book on natural history in his hands.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#91. I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Cherie Lunghi
#93. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#94. The America that never cared or felt guilty about portraying us as undignified people on their television screen, or in some old history book that never stated truthfully the facts of our invasion or the cruelty we had to endure for generations.
Leonard Peltier
#95. Books tap the wisdom of our species
the greatest minds, the best teachers
from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.
Carl Sagan
#96. this book, giving voice to what is so basic among men and women throughout history, I have translated it "the Quester."]
Eugene H. Peterson
#97. And the history books forgot about us, and the bible didn't mention us
Regina Spektor
#98. But I see history as a book with many pages
and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning.
George H. W. Bush
#99. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.
William Jones
#100. There are many ways to tell the history of the world. Oral histories that were later written down, including the Book of Genesis, the Rig Veda, and the Popul Vuh, focused especially on the actions of gods and on human/divine interactions. The
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
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