Top 100 History Is The Present Quotes
#1. History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E.L. Doctorow
#2. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#3. History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes
#4. The most important time in history is - NOW - the present,
So count your blessings cause time can't define the essence.
Talib Kweli
#6. 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
#7. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#8. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#9. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#10. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
Eamon Duffy
#11. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
Franz Boas
#12. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#13. History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.
John H. Arnold
#14. History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.
Aidan Chambers
#15. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#16. The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
William Hazlitt
#17. History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
John F. Kennedy
#18. You gotta live in the moment. I don't care what you've done in your life, it has nothing to do with what you're gonna do or what you can do. The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift-that's why they call it the present.
Mike Ditka
#19. The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power
Chris Hedges
#20. It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.
Christopher Kelly
#21. Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and imagine nothing so barbarous or savage but what is contrary to the manners of their own time.
Anthony Ashley Cooper III
#22. The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
Marshall McLuhan
#23. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
#24. What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.
Chris Marker
#25. If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
Henri Poincare
#26. What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different ... the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah
N. T. Wright
#27. History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
Hilary Mantel
#28. The future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.
C. D. Broad
#29. False Narrative: The Kingdom of God is Future No serious biblical scholar would deny that Jesus' proclaimed the kingdom of God. However, many scholars conclude that Jesus was not talking about our present world but rather an epoch in history that has not yet begun.
James Bryan Smith
#30. It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between
the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some
fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
Norman Davies
#31. YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED THE PRESENT. WORK HARD, BE HAPPY, AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE IN WAYWARD PINES!
Blake Crouch
#32. In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.
Roger D. Woodard
#34. The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
Felix Frankfurter
#35. The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
Vincent Starrett
#36. [The Euclidean algorithm is] the granddaddy of all algorithms, because it is the oldest nontrivial algorithm that has survived to the present day.
Donald Knuth
#37. Leave No Trace (bad language)
Sometimes she will speak of him as present, sometimes as past, and sometimes as always. That is how it should be. No one needs rescuing from her own story of the truth and no one needs to side step her history. p270
Hannah Nyala
#38. Ah, but is any history really all that ancient?' Second asked. 'Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?'
This man was more annoying than any history teacher Jordan had ever had.
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#39. Since periods of great change, such as the present one, come so rarely in human history, it is up to each of us to make the best use of our time to help create a happier world.
Dalai Lama
#40. We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
R.D. Laing
#41. Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.
Charles Kellogg
#42. How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire.
Simon Greenleaf
#43. It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.
Carl Jung
#44. You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
Ken Burns
#45. History is meaningless unless you discern how the past shapes the present.
Rory Clements
#46. It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.
David Wiseman
#47. Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.
Harri Holkeri
#48. The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#49. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
Yuval Noah Harari
#50. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.
Pearl S. Buck
#51. because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted.
Ralph Ellison
#52. [in] the whole of world history there is always only one really significant hour
the present ... [I]f you want to find eternity, you must serve the times.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#53. History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present.
David Von Drehle
#54. (A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and ... all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.
Valerie Martin
#55. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present
Karl Marx
#56. Is any history really all that ancient? ... Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#57. Politics is history in the present tense.
John Avlon
#59. I don't plan ahead; each book finds me. History itself, the resonance of the past with the present, is the common denominator in all of them.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#60. The lessons of past is critical for teachings in present. And experience in the future.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#61. I lost a girlfriend when I was in my 30s. She was 46. It all sounds so trite, but I put a Post-it on my dressing-room wall. It said, 'The past is history. The future is a mystery. This moment is a gift, which is why it's called the present.'
Samantha Bond
#62. If the present is any guide, government-sanctioned, counterfeit history is in your future.
Nick Turse
#63. Your childhood, said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties.
Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.
Gregory Maguire
#64. Look, you think I like history because I'm fascinated with the possibilities, with how it could have happened, but you're wrong. I like it because it's the one thing we actually know in life. The past is the only thing we can count on. The present? The future? They're anyone's guess.
Rebecca Serle
#65. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell
#66. 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
#67. Such terminological difficulties remind us that history, despite its popular identification with the past, is at all times most relevant to the present.
Rian Thum
#68. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register.
Hans F. Sennholz
#69. History is the archaeology of the present and future.
Patrick Mendis
#70. The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.
Alice Morse Earle
#71. Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#72. The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.
Michael Crichton
#73. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Johann Hari
#74. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
#75. The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
Edward Hallett Carr
#76. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#77. With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
Kenneth M. Stampp
#78. P.S. I offer a topic for discussion. The past is nothing more than the present romanticized, while the future is history with imagination. Any thoughts?
Scott Wilbanks
#79. We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present
Russell Kirk
#80. In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#81. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
Gordon Brown
#82. The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
Lord Acton
#83. History is just the present in retrospect. Times change but people do not.
Jeanne C. Stein
#84. No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.
Gloria Steinem
#85. Today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
Bil Keane
#86. No, I don't have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or history or whatever. What I'd like to rewrite is the present, here and now.
Haruki Murakami
#87. The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.
Ken Wilber
#88. Mddle Eastern history is filled with minefields, not because of what actually happened in the past, but because of how people read back the present into the past.
Christopher Catherwood
#89. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
#90. HE: History has no smell.
ME: Is that why we are nostalgic for it?
HE: Breathe in, breathe out. The past doesn't stink like the present.
Jeanette Winterson
#91. History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.
P.D. James
#92. The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
Lisa Unger
#93. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
Christine Kenneally
#94. The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
James Baldwin
#95. Philosophy, with the aid of experience, has at length banished the study of alchymy; and the present age, however desirous of riches, is content to seek them by the humbler means of commerce and industry.
Edward Gibbon
#96. [N]ot only is the most marvellous event in this book collaborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages.
Herman Melville
#97. We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet.
Shashi Tharoor
#98. Race is the San Andreas Fault of our culture as well as our history. Its fissures are forever present and not that far beneath the surface of every day life. To deny that is to risk being labeled delusional.
Mike Barnicle
#99. The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
Ernst Mach
#100. When we learn the wrong lessons of history, evil is reinforced rather than restrained- particularly when we use the injuries of the past to serve the interests of the future and ignore the injustices of the present.
Os Guinness
