Top 100 History Is Not Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. It is not the kings and generals that make history, but the masses of the people.
Nelson Mandela
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#9. 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
#10. I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson.
James Knowles III
#11. History has shown us time and again that what is right is not what is popular.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#12. ...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.
Mario Puzo
#13. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. This war is not necessary. We are truly sleepwalking through history.
Robert Byrd
#16. For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.
Conn Iggulden
#17. 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
#18. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
Penelope Lively
#19. A pure democracy is generally a very bad government, It is often the most tyrannical government on earth; for a multitude is often rash, and will not hear reason.
Noah Webster
#20. Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.
James Buchan
#21. Boston is a very proud franchise. The NBA misses them when they are not in the mix. They, along with teams like the Knicks and 76ers are a big part of the heart, soul and history of the league.
Doug Collins
#22. Moreover, if we could show, on general logical grounds, that the scientific quest is likely to succeed, one could not understand why anything like success has been so rare in the long history of human endeavours to know more about our world.
Karl R. Popper
#24. We can always be sure of one thing - that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.
Christopher Hitchens
#25. 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
#26. In A Brief History Of Time I used the word "God" like Einstein did as a shorthand for the laws of physics. However, this is not what most people mean by God, so I have decided not to use the term. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a God.
Stephen Hawking
#27. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Elizabeth Kostova
#28. Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
#29. To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.
Wallace Stegner
#31. In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Read more at
Leo Tolstoy
#32. The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
Alfred North Whitehead
#33. Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
Arundhati Roy
#34. This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.
Naomi Alderman
#35. The most important fact of this century is not that Earth is threatened in many ways, It is that for the first time in all of its history a decisive means of protecting the home planet exists. It is by using space.
William E. Burrows
#36. The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.
Wallace Stegner
#37. Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision
Harry Crews
#38. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#39. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#41. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.
Joseph Bruchac
#42. In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point
out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is
not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate
them.
Pierre Trudeau
#43. The history of any nation is not only a succession of events, but also a chain of ideas.
Pyotr Chaadayev
#44. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#45. More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors.
M.F. Moonzajer
#46. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
#47. The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.
Benjamin Tucker
#48. Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#49. To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
#50. The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler's time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.
Timothy Snyder
#51. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#52. Paleo is not a diet. It's not a fad. It's not a rigid set of rules to follow. It's not a sound bite. It's an exploration of history, nutrition, the human diet, and, most important, our health.
Liz Wolfe
#53. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#55. I didn't see it as someone who worked as hard as I did. But now that Saint Laurent is part of history, it makes me a part of history, so, yes, finally it's not such a bad thing to have been a muse.
Loulou De La Falaise
#56. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#57. 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
#58. I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
William Gibson
#59. The neglect of a generation is regeneration so every soul may become its own history, not the incessant anxiety of unnaturally imposed lessons, a plague of its own making.
Dew Platt
#60. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
James Russell Lowell
#61. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#62. Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
C.V. Wedgwood
#63. History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#64. Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous Huxley
#65. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis
Rabih Alameddine
#66. History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#67. The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.
Christopher Hitchens
#68. Of that time, there is still much we do not know.
Tom Bissell
#69. Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
A.S. Byatt
#70. This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
Jonas Salk
#71. History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.
Lord Acton
#72. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#73. Do not be frivolous with the gift of a day. Right now it's all you have. Yesterday is history.
Robert Genn
#74. The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them.
Paul Murray
#75. I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science.
David Deming
#76. I do not approve of naval historians who seek out flaws in the losers' battle plans and tactics. The way to profit from history is to put oneself in the shoes of the tactical decision maker as he confronts a many-faceted problem in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
Wayne Hughes
#77. This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale
Christopher Hitchens
#78. It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Alan Bennett
#79. The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves. That faith calls out the divinity within. You can do anything. You fail only when you do not strive sufficiently to manifest infinite power. As soon as a man or a nation loses faith, death comes.
Swami Vivekananda
#80. '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
#81. Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.
Sharon Kay Penman
#82. It's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.
Scarlett Johansson
#83. 'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
Christopher Hitchens
#84. Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.
Gina Barreca
#85. Official history is merely a veil to hide the truth of what really happened. When the veil is lifted, again and again we see that not only is the official version not true, it is often 100% wrong.
David Icke
#86. The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.
David Lloyd-Jones
#87. Man is above all else mind, consciousness
that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
Antonio Gramsci
#88. History is not necessarily what happened but what is recorded.
Debbie Terranova
#89. '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
#90. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.
Jose Marti
#91. Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.
Lebbeus Woods
#92. An affection which is not inspired by the Lord will soon be transformed into lust. Samson is not alone in the history of man in failing in this regard. Delilah is still cutting the hair of man today!
Watchman Nee
#93. History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army.
Allan Nevins
#94. This concern for the poor is in the Gospel, it is within the tradition of the Church, it is not an invention of communism and it must not be turned into an ideology, as has sometimes happened before in the course of history.
Pope Francis
#95. It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.
Ludwig Von Mises
#96. History is full of lady engineers and spies and scientists. But history is also written by the victorious, and it may not surprise you that thus far the overwhelming winners have been straight white dudes. That hasn't worked out so well for everyone else.
Sam Maggs
#97. My history is really playing live - not writing or recording.
Tom Jenkinson
#98. It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.
Alan Brennert
#99. To feel strong, to walk amongst humans with a tremendous feeling of confidence and superiority is not at all wrong. The sense of superiority in bodily strength is borne out by the long history of mankind paying homage in folklore, song and poetry to strong men
Fredrick Hatfield
#100. The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.
Richard D. Wolff
