Top 100 History Henry Quotes
#1. That mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history - Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
Julian Barnes
#4. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ...
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.
Henry David Thoreau
#5. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.
Henry Ford
#6. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#8. A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
Henry Kissinger
#9. Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
Lord Henry Wotton
#10. There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography.
Henry David Thoreau
#11. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#12. The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the Apostles has been a history of spiritual movements.
Henry Parry Liddon
#13. The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.
George Henry Lewes
#14. Nothing moves me more than the history of the United States.
Henry Rollins
#15. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.
Henry David Thoreau
#16. The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.
Henry Kissinger
#17. A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry Adams
#18. History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.
Henry A. Kissinger
#19. A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#20. I have learned, as I wrote, that history must be discovered, not declared. It's an admission that one grows in life.
Henry A. Kissinger
#21. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.
Charles Henry Parkhurst
#22. I come from a town of great musicians: Washington, D.C. It's no joke, that history.
Henry Rollins
#23. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#24. A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
William Powell
#25. I have been curious about Haiti for many years. The history of the country is as fascinating as it is turbulent.
Henry Rollins
#26. Revolutionaries - true revolutionaries - are aggressive, ruthless, and generally seize the main chance, as William Henry Drayton did when he saw that stump-speaking was getting him nowhere. But defenders of the status quo tend toward caution and legalisms and inaction until it is too late
John Buchanan
#27. History's just one darn thing after another.
Henry Ford
#28. China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.
Henry A. Kissinger
#29. Russia is tough. The history, the land, the people - brutal.
Henry Rollins
#30. This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old.
James Henry Breasted
#31. The most superficial student of Roman history must be struck by the extraordinary degree in which the fortunes of the republic were affected by the presence of foreigners, under different names, on her soil.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#32. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
#33. Give me liberty or give me death.
[From a speech given at Saint John's Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt's Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]
Patrick Henry
#34. A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books.
Henry Ward Beecher
#36. 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
#37. This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#38. The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Henry Grunwald
#39. I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
#40. Kind messages, that pass from land to land; Kind letters, that betray the heart's deep history, In which we feel the pressure of a hand,
One touch of fire,
and all the rest is mystery!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#41. History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.
Thomas Henry Huxley
#42. Baseball and American football and hockey are all ahead because they have a history. The MLS is kind of new. So hopefully, in time, and with players coming and trying to develop the game, and the U.S. team also doing well - at the last World Cup, they finished above England and created some buzz.
Thierry Henry
#43. History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry Adams
#44. I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors.
There is so much aspiration in them,
so much audacious hope and trembling fear,
so much of the heart's history, that all errors
and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of
in the amiable self assertion of youth.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#45. He also telephoned the Real Time Computer Complex on the ground floor of the Operations Wing to ask that an additional big I.B.M. computer be brought onto the line.
Henry S.F. Cooper Jr.
#46. A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind.
Lewis Henry Morgan
#47. Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.
Henry Ward Beecher
#49. It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.
James Henry Breasted
#50. Ending the slave trade was contrary to British economic interests. For all its limitations and hypocrisies - British slavery itself, of course, still continued to exist - I still think it was a great moment in human history.
Henry Louis Gates
#51. Trial by jury must be preserved. It is the best system ever invented for a free people in the world's history.
John Henry Wigmore
#52. Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.
Henry A. Kissinger
#53. Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government can't make it worse.
Henry Morgenthau Jr.
#54. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women.
O. Henry
#55. Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?
Henry Miller
#57. You should not think that you can shape history only by your will. This is also why I'm against the concept of intervention when you don't know its ultimate implications.
Henry A. Kissinger
#58. History knows no greater display of courage than that shown by the people of the Soviet Union.
Henry L. Stimson
#59. Wasn't history full of the destruction of precious things?
Henry James
#60. We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.
Henry Ward Beecher
#62. Early American speeches, from Washington's to Patrick Henry's, have been detheologized in history textbooks. No one has called it censorship.
James G. Watt
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.
James Henry Breasted
#66. The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#67. It is one of history's ironies that Communism, advertised as a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions.
Henry Kissinger
#71. Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
Henry Louis Gates
#72. Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.
Henry De Montherlant
#73. For the greatest part of humanity and the longest periods of history, empire has been the typical mode of government.
Henry Kissinger
#74. So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
Henry Louis Gates
#75. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
Malcolm X
#76. For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.
Henry A. Kissinger
#77. It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.
Henry David Thoreau
#78. The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself.
Henry Fairlie
#79. When Milly smiled it was a public event - when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They
Henry James
#80. People ask me whether I see 'Star Wars' as a comedy or a tragedy, but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like 'Henry V,' and partly a fantasy, like 'The Tempest.'
Ian Doescher
#81. Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course.
Henry Adams
#82. Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.
Larry McMurtry
#83. The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
Henry Ward Beecher
#84. Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.
Henry Hampton
#85. A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth.
Henry Ward Beecher
#86. There is nothing finer in history than Thomas at Chickamauga.
Henry M. Cist
#87. If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#89. Burleigh, absolutely; and a lot about Elizabeth. I mean I found when I play Henry V a lot of connections with the hidden history of the connection between Francis Bacon and Elizabeth.
Mark Rylance
#90. 'American Sniper' is a film that erases history, spectacularizes violence, and reduces war and its aftermath to cheap entertainment, with an underexplained referent to the mental problems many vets live with when they return home from the war.
Henry Giroux
#93. It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
Henry David Thoreau
#94. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.
Henry Miller
#95. It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it.
Henry Kissinger
#96. One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
#97. Certainly nothing is easier than to rewrite history. If we had made Taiwan a separate state, it would have led to a fundamental conflict with China, and probably to war. Certainly in the long term, it would have led to war.
Henry A. Kissinger
#98. The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".
George Henry Lewes
#100. The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense.
Henry Rollins
