Top 100 History Is Not Quotes
#1. 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
#3. The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
James W. Loewen
#4. Because history is not the background - history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times!
Philip Roth
#5. History is a big word ... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.
Antonio Tabucchi
#6. I can only answer that I tried to tell the truth and, if not be objective, at least be fair; history is not served when reporters prize trepidation and propriety over the robust journalistic duty to tell the whole story.
Randy Shilts
#7. History is not happenstance: it is conspiratorial. Carefully planned and executed by people in power.
George Carlin
#8. History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
Idries Shah
#9. A nation's preoccupation with history is not infrequently an effort to obtain a passport for the future. Often it is a forged passport.
Eric Hoffer
#10. History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.
Joshua Clover
#11. History is not made by great dreams, but by the petty wants of all respectable, moderately thievish and selfish people, that is, of everyone. All our ideas, loves, plans, heroic ideals, all these lofty things are worthless.
Karel Capek
#12. History is not our guide, it is not our friend. It is a passing stranger, one which shadows legend, sprinkling it with the seeds of truth.
Michelle Sagara West
#14. The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.
Eugene Lim
#17. Adam was told to toughen up. Get over it. We hear this a lot. History is in the past, bad things happened but it is time to move on. But history is not past for us. Adam
Stan Grant
#18. I subscribe to William Faulkner's' view that history is not just about what we were before but who we are now.
Ken Burns
#19. History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.
John Henrik Clarke
#20. My father tells me that the further you get away from an experience, the deeper it roots itself inside of you. Don't fool yourself, baby, he said. Time does not heal and history is not progressive.
Danzy Senna
#21. 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
#22. History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.
James Redfield
#23. To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny.
Alan Cohen
#24. I had serious training of painting styles from different historical periods ... But to have all this training is not enough to be an artist. You have to add a new page to history; otherwise you are not making a contribution. But making history is not easy.
Liu Dan
#25. The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
Wynton Marsalis
#26. History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies.
F. M. Powicke
#27. History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past. And because it is about arguments that we have, it is about us.
Ira Berlin
#28. History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.
Julian Barnes
#29. The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.
Frederic William Maitland
#31. And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.
John Henry Newman
#32. History is not the pure past; history is a past interpreted from the present of the historian.
Justo L. Gonzalez
#33. History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone's heritage." Captain Hank Bracker. This quote is from the flyleaf of the award winning book "The Exciting Story of Cuba.
Hank Bracker
#34. History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx
#35. Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Carl Jung
#36. History is not a catalogue but ... a convincing version of events.
A.J.P. Taylor
#37. So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well.
Ali Smith
#38. Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral?
Raymond Geuss
#39. American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished.
John F. Kennedy
#40. I believe that history is not made by cynics; it is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. Let us be these people.
Tzipi Livni
#41. Eloquence is merely the product of intelligence. History is not shaped by men of genius. It is shaped by men of unwavering will. Men who focus whatever brains they have on the savvy application of power. In the end, brawn will always do the heavy lifting. Brawn will always win the war.
Taona Dumisani Chiveneko
#43. [The Fuhrer] is one of those lonely men of the ages on whom history is not tested, but who themselves are the makers of history.
Benito Mussolini
#44. To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ... it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.
John Quincy Adams
#45. Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides.
Marston Bates
#46. History is not life, but since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious.
Louis D. Brandeis
#47. History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.
James Baldwin
#49. The current state of knowledge remains vague when history is not considered, just as history remains vague without substantive knowledge about the current state.
Ludwik Fleck
#50. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.
Sam Harris
#53. The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
James Buchan
#54. History is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago; it's a story about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
Lewis H. Lapham
#55. History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul
Andrei Tarkovsky
#56. THE FACE OF HISTORY is not in the well-preserved faces of the famous, but in the remains of those who lived in the moment
Gerry Burnie
#57. History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
A.J.P. Taylor
#58. History is not going to look kindly on us if we just keep our head in the sand on armed autonomous robotics issue because it sounds too science fiction.
Peter Singer
#59. History is not what you think. It is what you can remember.
W.C. Sellar
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#64. History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.
Lord Acton
#65. History is not necessarily what happened but what is recorded.
Debbie Terranova
#66. 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
#68. 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
#69. History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation's spirit can be achieved.
Aysha Taryam
#70. In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.
Richard M. Nixon
#71. In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.
C. Wright Mills
#72. One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain.
Salman Rushdie
#73. History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
#74. History is not a fixed truth. It changes with the speaker.
Jenn Reese
#76. History is not reassuring on the subject of the longevity of seemingly lasting great nations, is it?
Dick Cavett
#77. History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges
#78. Biology, list history, is not built with 'if's.
Andrea Moro
#79. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.
Vasily Grossman
#80. 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
#81. History is not the annals; it's what happens around us when we're unaware it's history.
Amit Chaudhuri
#82. History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
Grace Lee Boggs
#83. History is not ended. It will sooner or later take up the threads apparently broken off forever and knit them together in a new pattern.
Rudolf Hess
#84. History is not what happened in the past, but the best story we can tell with the available material
Joshua Wolf Shenk
#86. History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.
Abigail Adams
#87. History is not merely what happened. It is what happened in the context of what might have happened.
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper
#88. History is not to be whitewashed "by a screening out of the importance of suffering."
Johann Baptist Metz
#89. History is not written in the interests of morality.
Agnes Repplier
#90. Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#91. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.
Ian Mortimer
#92. One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution ... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.
Felix Frankfurter
#94. Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.
Carl Lotus Becker
#95. 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
#96. While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.
Sarah Vowell
#97. History is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
Jared Diamond
#98. 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
#99. Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That's outrageous in a city where the past is still visible.
Pete Hamill
