Top 100 History History Quotes
#1. We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.
Kurt Vonnegut
#2. The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.
Dalai Lama
#3. My friends, history, history calls us to this time and to this place. A solemn choice rests with us - where do we go from here? Do we move slowly and incrementally? Or do we seize the challenge of our time and tackle the great issues of our day.
Thomas Vilsack
#4. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.
Kenneth Clark
#5. But man is not only made by history - history is made by man.
Erich Fromm
#7. Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune.
Raymond Queneau
#8. 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
#9. I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Jean Cocteau
#10. Every age sort of has its own history. History is really the stories that we retell to ourselves to make them relevant to every age. So we put our own values and our own spin on it.
Terry Jones
#11. None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together; but we have to create our own history - history of United Yugoslavia, also in the future.
Josip Broz Tito
#12. It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#13. Another foundational truth is that God has a plan for history. History is providential, not accidental ...
D. A. Fisher
#14. Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Joseph Campbell
#15. I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
Howard Zinn
#16. Sometimes it's about the economic situation and sometimes it's about the fear of others. Sometimes it's about protecting the generally accepted values. If you look at history, history is just a succession of people meeting other people, either through commerce, voyages or wars.
Philippe Falardeau
#17. I have always believed that cowards never make history, history is created by people with courage and wisdom. Courage is individual, wisdom comes with experience.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#19. Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions.
Tanith Lee
#20. In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
Wallace Stegner
#21. Trapped in history. History trapped in me.
Djanet Sears
#22. It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.
Adam Gopnik
#23. History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
#24. What are we if we are not products of our history? History is not in our past but forms us in the present. And how histories are written or interpreted depends on what we do today.
H.O. Charles
#25. All of political history history can be summed up as a struggle to throw the bad guys out and put the good guys in.
John Pugsley
#26. Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious, swarmlike life of mankind, uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes.
Leo Tolstoy
#27. I feel like giving myself a pat on the back. We can create history tonight. We can bid goodbye to 10 years of (Liberal-Conservative) government which has ground to a halt, and get a new government and a new majority in Denmark.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt
#28. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
#29. There are horizons through the brickwork, you wait and see.
Jessie Burton
#30. The power of uncovering India's biggest concealment is in your hands.
Sambhav Ratnakar
#31. Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.
Steven Spielberg
#32. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#33. As storytellers, you're always somehow creating history.
Cary Fukunaga
#34. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#35. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.
Carl Becker
#36. Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Winston Churchill
#37. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert Kennedy
#39. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#40. Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.
Mstislav Rostropovich
#41. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#42. The history of colonisation is replete with tales of happy, hippy natives dancing around half-naked, taking fantastic drugs and having as much sex as they could wave a stick at.
Victor L. Machin
#43. That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible.
Emir Kusturica
#44. More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that is why we have the United Nations.
Kofi Annan
#45. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#46. Environmental history ... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat ... The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.
Roderick Nash
#47. Second, how much you should study doctrine depends on your personal history. Study
Anonymous
#48. Never before in history has the global marketplace touched so many consumers and provided access to so many producers.
Peter Diamandis
#50. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.
Harry Reid
#51. You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.
John Edward Williams
#52. It is not the kings and generals that make history, but the masses of the people.
Nelson Mandela
#53. History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
#54. Yeah, I suppose it was a history. I wanted it to be more of a geography, but she kept slappin' my hand.' Trev
Terry Pratchett
#55. The dominant male is history. Could you see a male Lady Gaga? The closest we've got is Justin Bieber, who'd be locked up if he tried the stuff Gaga gets away with. Women are the only rock stars now. Adele is brutally honest. I want to be like her.
Tom Odell
#56. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
Eric Schmidt
#57. Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.
John Terraine
#58. History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.
Amit Chaudhuri
#59. Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.
George Lucas
#60. Bush has done more to create passions for what they call terror than any other Administration in this nation's history. I get rather afraid when the most powerful man in the world talks to, and gets answers back from, God.
Randall Robinson
#61. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!
Jack London
#62. History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.
Bashar Al-Assad
#63. The agreement,' the colonel announced, 'says thirty-seven officers, fifty vehicles, and one hundred seventy five men.'
'What agreement?'
'The Berlin Agreement,
Andrei Cherny
#64. When 99% of people doubt your idea, you're either gravely wrong or about to make history.
Scott Belsky
#65. A few months ago, and again this week, bin Laden publicly vowed to publicly wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder, and their history is bloody.
William J. Clinton
#66. Always do what you're afraid to do-Robert F. Kennedy
Evan Thomas
#68. The thirst for equality can express itself either as a desire to draw everyone down to one's level, or to raise oneself and everyone else up.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.
Lester B. Pearson
#70. At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength.
Jawaharlal Nehru
#72. People kept on talking about the true king of Ankh-Morpork, but history taught a cruel lesson. It said - often in words of blood - that the true king was the one who got crowned."
Terry Pratchett
#73. 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
#74. The Obama administration and the Democratic Congress have taken the biggest lurch to the left in policy in American history. There've been no - no Congress, no administration that has run this far to the left in such a small period of time. And there is a reaction to that.
Haley Barbour
#75. There is no nation in the history that has not experienced bloodshed and murdering. We all have committed the same mistakes in a different manner.
M.F. Moonzajer
#76. In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.
Marie Arana
#77. History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
Simon Schama
#78. People read what news they wanted to and each accordingly built his own rathouse of history's rags and straws.
Thomas Pynchon
#79. I'd like to write a history, maybe of the Reformation.
Jane Haddam
#80. The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock 'n' roll.
Lester Bangs
#81. The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.
Jon Meacham
#82. Each being in the universe yearns for the free energy necessary for survival and development. Each existence resists extinction. The consequent history of violence in the universe is as inevitable as the gravitational pull between the Earth and the Sun.
Brian Swimme
#83. If you are going to describe the history of animation, you'd look at the early Disney work, then 'Bugs Bunny,' 'Road Runner' and other Warner Brothers theatrical productions. But when you got to 'Rocky and Bullwinkle,' you'd see they were unique: They assumed you had a brain in your head.
Ray Bradbury
#84. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#85. There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon.
P.J. Parker
#86. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Gil Scott-Heron
#87. I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
A.E. Samaan
#88. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.
George S. Patton
#89. To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
#90. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#91. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.
Mark Twain
#92. Conquest by force is not sanctioned by God. The Americans have no right to be here. We will defeat them because we believe that this land they usurp is ours; God created it for us. The whole history of mankind has shown how faith endures while steel rusts.
-Istak
F. Sionil Jose
#93. In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.
Nick Clooney
#94. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
Victor Davis Hanson
#95. I think war is a crime. If you don't believe me, ask the infantry, ask the dead.
Michael McCormick
#96. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
#97. Well, is true. I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth!
Donna Tartt
#98. How many ideas have there been in the history of man which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#99. There are some days when history is made. Yesterday was one - and I was honoured to be in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in. During his soaring inaugural address, the new president gazed over a teeming National Mall that was crowded with more than a million people.
Des Browne
#100. Women's history is the
primary tool for women's emancipation.
Gerda Lerner
