Top 100 History Facts Quotes
#1. But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
Richard Owen
#4. History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
Andrew Marr
#5. 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
#6. We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.
Karl Barth
#7. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
#8. The history of science is full of revolutionary advances that required small insights that anyone might have had, but that, in fact, only one person did.
Isaac Asimov
#9. The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered.
Arthur Kornberg
#10. If history teaches anything, it teaches that self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly.
Ronald Reagan
#11. Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own history based on, but not limited by, facts.
John Steinbeck
#12. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
#13. When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.
John Malkovich
#14. Clinging uncritically to traditional ideas and beliefs often serves to obscure or deny real facts of our life history.
Alice Miller
#15. In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.
John Edgar Wideman
#16. In fact, there are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history, with an estimated 27 million in bondage across the globe.
Jen Lilley
#17. 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
#18. Culture is the most potent method of adaptation that has emerged in the evolutionary history of the living world. - Theodosius Dobzhanksky ... the 'facts' of culture history are interpretations based upon assumed culture process.
Jerry Sabloff
#19. Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#20. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.
Gary DeMar
#21. 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
#22. The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#23. A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.
J. B. Bury
#24. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#25. My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it's a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#26. The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Ernest Renan
#27. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.
Terence McKenna
#28. The ending of partition was inevitable because Ireland was one nation by history and tradition , by facts of race, geography, and economy
Seamus Costello
#29. If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.
Eric Metaxas
#30. The central fact of North American history is that there were fifteen British Colonies before 1776. Thirteen rebelled and two did not.
June Callwood
#31. Hip to the fact that well-behaved women rarely make history, Diane [Wilson] has already inspired a new movement of totally uncontrollable, irresistible and unreasonable women!
Medea Benjamin
#32. The world is progressing, the future is bright and no one can change this general trend of history. We should carry on constant propaganda among the people on the facts of world progress and the bright future ahead so that they will build their confidence in victory.
Mao Zedong
#33. How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds
Carl Sagan
#34. What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.
Aldous Huxley
#35. The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history.
Eduard Bernstein
#36. History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.
Julius Lester
#37. A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably ... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
Aristotle.
#39. History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.
Voltaire
#40. Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.
Cary Carson
#41. The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance.
Walter Shaw Sparrow
#42. You don't need to hide the fact that you're in recovery, but you don't have to share your history of addiction with acquaintances at work, either.
Mallory Ortberg
#43. Of course, history is only a muddle of facts and a fuddle of professors, and anyone who thinks it is one clear voice saying "Arise, sir Knight" deserves a life sentence in Camelot.
Wilfrid Sheed
#44. History engineered if the facts couldn't be generally accepted.
Toba Beta
#45. Given the fact that many thousands of female workers are active in history, it is vital for the trade unions to incorporate them into their movement.
Clara Zetkin
#46. Not that anybody cares two pins about history in these days.We've got rid of history; history is all my eye. But I've got to tell you the facts.
Carter Dickson
#47. I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history.
Anatoli Boukreev
#48. I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.
Robert Fulghum
#49. 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
#50. Far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, [monotheism] is in fact a monstrous step backwards
a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.
Isaac Bonewits
#51. 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
#52. There are ruins all over the world, testaments of the atrocities, and burial chambers of the lost souls. But the facts are always misinterpreted. History is inaccurate.
Jeyn Roberts
#53. Do not feel trapped by the facts of your history. Your history is not some set of sacred facts. History is an interpretation, and your history is yours to interpret. To know the history and then reinterpret it gives you additional depth.
Harriet Rubin
#54. I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing.
Ken Burns
#55. The egalitarian doctrine is manifestly contrary to all the facts established by biology and by history. Only fanatical partisans of this theory can contend that what distinguishes the genius from the dullard is entirely the effect of postnatal influences.
Ludwig Von Mises
#56. True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.
David O. McKay
#57. When I looked further into my mother's history, I realised that her anxieties and her neuroses could be accounted for by facts from a very early age. Her parents, William Henry Jones and Sarah Emily, were desperately poor.
John Rhys-Davies
#58. When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.
Philip Kitcher
#59. We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
William Hazlitt
#60. History is a matter of interpretation, but you have to start with certain facts.
Peter Kuznick
#61. To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.
Noam Chomsky
#62. My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.
C.V. Wedgwood
#63. These facts have been completely removed from history. One has to practically scream them from the rooftops.
Noam Chomsky
#64. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
Howard Zinn
#65. Part of history is facts. The other part is what we find easier to believe.
Walter Darby Bannard
#66. A person in search of his ancestors naturally likes to believe the best of them, and the best in terms of contemporary standards. Where genealogical facts are few, and these located in the remote past, reconstruction of family history is often more imaginative than correct.
James G. Leyburn
#67. I adore [photography's] uneasy mix of fact and fiction - its dubious claim to truth - its status as history.
Eleanor Antin
#69. It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
Bill Vaughan
#70. The events might have taken place twelve centuries back, but when I closed my eyes, I could visualize many things. It made me very emotional. Later, when I grew up, I became passionate about history and started detaching it from emotional point of view and became more aware of the facts.
Sudha Murty
#71. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone De Beauvoir
#72. And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.
Stacy Schiff
#73. I don't want to be a slave to history or facts. As long as I'm getting a good cursory understanding of what it is and I'm not drifting too far away at certain points, then I can play with the idea and take it anywhere I want to.
Scott Walker
#74. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
Francis Parkman
#75. Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
#76. The resurrection is a fact better attested than any event recorded in any history, whether ancient or modern.
Charles Spurgeon
#77. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.
Mary Ruefle
#78. A mere collector of supposed facts is as useful as a collector of matchboxes.
Lucien Febvre
#79. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
#80. Indeed, we might all forget where we have been if we didn't have somebody to assemble and arrange the little blocks called facts from which history is constructed, artfully or less so.
Jay Parini
#81. So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
Tacitus
#83. Unconditional love is a lofty ideal, but unconditional hate is a fact well documented by history.
Mason Cooley
#84. Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history isto be read and written.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#85. Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.
Isvari
#86. What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.
Edward Hallett Carr
#87. Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.
Helen Cam
#88. I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.
Mark Twain
#89. Christ is the great central fact in the world's history. To Him everything looks forward or backward. All the lines of history converge upon Him.
Charles Spurgeon
#90. The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.
Cate Blanchett
#91. I'm a history major, baby. I know tons of useless facts
Elle Kennedy
#92. The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it) ...
John Ashbery
#93. At any given period in history the ideas of the common mind are found to antedate the facts. The facts of the twentieth century are approached with the ideas, feelings, prejudices of the tenth.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#94. "The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
Tom Stoppard
#95. truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it's considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not a historian. I am fascinated by people.
Svetlana Alexievich
#96. One of the reasons we do history, in fact, is because it acts as a brake, a control, on our otherwise unbridled enthusiasm for our own ideas.
N. T. Wright
#97. At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
Mike Jay
#98. In other words, that works of history are mere collections of facts. It is fiction alone that can show us the true nature of human beings
Daisaku Ikeda
#99. My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history.
Martin Kippenberger
#100. Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.
Augustus William Hare
