Top 90 History Lesson Quotes
#1. How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson
Aberjhani
#2. It's a bit of a history lesson, being an actor. I was in 'Burnt By The Sun' at the National, which was set in Stalinist Russia, so I discovered all about that. You learn so much as you go along.
Michelle Dockery
#3. Not that kind of proof, Kyber. Come on, Buck Rogers got a ride in a flying car, and all I get is a slide show and a history lesson? It's going to take more than this to convince me that I slept for almost two centuries.
Susan Grant
#4. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties
or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
Julian Barnes
#5. The show is not a history lesson or intellectual exploration. It is entertainment based on tension, irony and storytelling that is closely related to today's life.
Matthew Weiner
#6. Inaugurals conventionally start with a history lesson and finish with a prayer.
Jonathan Raban
#7. Prince Brigan. And where's your Lady?"
"In her history lesson. She went without complaint and I've been trying to prepare myself for what it might mean. Either she's planning to bribe me about something or she's ill.
Kristin Cashore
#8. Sin in the Second City is a masterful history lesson, a harrowing biography, and - best of all - a superfun read. The Everleigh story closely follows the turns of American history like a little sister. I can't recommend this book loudly enough.
Darin Strauss
#9. He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which
having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles
he found inaccurate and boring.
Susan Cooper
#10. Fuck your lineage," said Gerris. "The dragons won't care about your blood, except maybe how it tastes. You cannot tame a dragon with a history lesson. They're monsters, not maesters. Quent, is this truly what you want to do?
George R R Martin
#11. I don't read biographies for moral instruction, or for a history lesson. I want to know what people are saying about me.
Bauvard
#12. He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.
Susanna Clarke
#13. Music is there for us to explore. To intentionally limit yourself to one, two, or three genres is limitation at its worst. Music is huge; it's a gigantic history lesson, and if you are true music fan or a musician, you should explore it. It's all right there in front of us.
Phil Anselmo
#15. His face was a study in concentration and empathy, as if every word I said was of supreme importance. It was that expression, that intensity, that had worn me down, and won me over, history lesson after history lesson, day after day, and he didn't even know I was his.
Amy Harmon
#16. Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.
Kate DiCamillo
#17. I think all novels are contemporary. When people went to see 'Antony-Cleopatra' at the Globe in the 16th century, they were not going to get a history lesson on the Roman Empire. It was about love, sex, and also about dynastic troubles.
Richard Flanagan
#18. That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.
Graham Swift
#19. If I thought this would turn into a history lesson, I would have picked a better classroom than a city street.
-Grimalkin
Julie Kagawa
#20. I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'
Malorie Blackman
#21. The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints.
Walter Gilbert
#22. My biggest life lesson is that the past is the past. I do my best not to bring history into my present. It ain't ever easy, but it usually creates more opportunity for joyful experiences.
Dash Mihok
#23. Perhaps the most important lesson of the New Social Historians is that history belongs to those about whom or whose documents survive.
Bruce Jackson
#24. Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.
Emile Zola
#25. Every campaign, Garry Wills once wrote, "taught Nixon the same lesson: mobilize resentment against those in power." History taught the same to many conservative and reactionary populist movements, whose real attitude to those in power and authority was one of a servile, envious, vicarious adoration.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. No one has died from giving a bad presentation. Well, at least one person did, President William Henry Harrison, but he developed pneumonia after giving the longest inaugural address in U.S. history. The easy lesson from his story: keep it short, or you might die.
Scott Berkun
#27. Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.
Charles Krauthammer
#28. It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.
Anthony Doerr
#29. To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.
Fred D'Aguiar
#30. Every person should take a lesson from history. We should understand that wherever there have been internal fights and conflicts in the country, the country has been weakened. Due to this, the danger from outside increases. The country has to pay a big price due to this type of weakness.
Rajiv Gandhi
#31. I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democratic Pakistan is the world community's best guarantee of stability in Asia.
Benazir Bhutto
#32. Will this generation be able to turn things around and learn a valuable lesson from all of this? I hope so, but I have my doubts. The damage has been done. And as a lifelong student of history, it's quite evident that human beings don't learn from the mistakes of past generations.
Aaron B. Powell
#33. The great and abiding lesson of American history, particularly the cold war, is that the engine of capitalism, the individual, is mightier than any collective.
Rand Paul
#34. Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.
Richard Marius
#35. The great lesson of history for us is that strength and resolve bring peace and order, and weakness and vacillation invite chaos and conflict.
Rick Perry
#37. Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus.
You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
Will Durant
#38. We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#39. And what lesson can we draw from Volantene history?"
"If you want to conquer the world, you best have dragons.
George R R Martin
#40. It is a hard lesson to learn and a lesson we most of us need to learn at some point: We cannot assume to know a person's history from their face.
Na'ama Yehuda
#41. Admittedly, there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face.
Ronald Reagan
#42. The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.
Ben Bernanke
#43. Nearly everything that happened had happened before. The grand lesson of history.
Brandon Sanderson
#44. Is the only lesson of history to be that mankind is unteachable?
Winston Churchill
#45. World War II proved a hypothesis that Alexis de Tocqueville advanced a century before: the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense; at its weakest when war is most limited. This is a lesson with enduring relevance to our own times - and our own wars.
David Frum
#46. The lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history.
Thomas G. Donlan
#47. There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#48. Truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#49. As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
Henry Adams
#50. As we were told about others, so others will be told about us. that is "HISTORY". and the most painfull thing about it is that, it does not repeat itself. it comes onece in life and never again.
Hamzat Haruna Ribah
#51. Also you don't have to worry about stumbling over any sexual fetishes unless you're checking somebody's browser history, and I figure once was enough to teach you that lesson." Dominic choked on his milkshake. "I hate you." Sarah sipped her shake, expression mild.
Seanan McGuire
#52. My quest is that every school day, every class, every lesson would be a form of sponsored mobility, and that every child would have the options and opportunities that history has so often closed off.
Teresa D. Hill
#53. The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs.
Richard M. Nixon
#54. If there was a lesson to be taken from history, it was that men lived but never learned from
Alanna Knight
#55. This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.
Gertrude Stein
#56. History's lesson is to make the most of reform opportunities when they arise because they do not arise often and they do not last long.
Christopher Bond
#57. The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.
Nick Cohen
#58. Learn the lesson of your own pain
learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul
in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.
Mary Augusta Ward
#59. Trust the people
that is the crucial lesson of history.
Ronald Reagan
#60. Peace cannot be bought, Aleron," he murmured to LaFortier. "History teaches that lesson. I learned it. You should have, too." LaFortier
Jim Butcher
#61. History is the most patient of teachers. If Man doesn't get the lesson, it keeps repeating itself until he finally gets it.
Christian Adam Ribeiraud
#62. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
#63. The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime
Arthur Herman
#65. All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I've found I don't have the right to make a judgment on someone based on something I've read. I don't have the right to judge anything. That's the lesson I've learned
Kurt Cobain
#66. I believe history teaches us a categorical lesson: that once a people are determined to become free, then nothing in the world can stop them reaching their goal.
Desmond Tutu
#67. But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights - by attempting to placate aggression.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#68. Just because you are innocent does not mean that others cannot harm you. History teaches us that lesson.
Frederick Lenz
#69. 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
#70. A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system.
Janet Yellen
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. One key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium.
Dave Barry
#75. History's lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.
Howard Jacobson
#76. The history of science teaches only too plainly the lesson that no single method is absolutely to be relied upon, that sources of error lurk where they are least expected, and that they may escape the notice of the most experienced and conscientious worker.
John William Strutt
#77. History's one great lesson is that reactionaries are losers.
George Otis
#78. No culture in history has ever embraced moral relativism and survived. Our own culture, therefore, will either (1) be the first, and disprove history's clearest lesson, or (2) persist in its relativism and die, or (3) repent of its relativism and live. There is no other option.
Peter Kreeft
#80. The most common lesson of history is that the butchery of one mass of people by another is, in the minds of the butchers, sanctioned by their god.
Dee Hock
#81. I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.
Billie Jean King
#82. That hope is little more than the premonition of regret. This is the first lesson of history.
R. Scott Bakker
#83. Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.
Russell Baker
#84. The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley
#85. This is the true lesson of our history: war, preparation for war, and foreign military interventions have served for the most part not to protect us, as we are constantly told, but rather to sap our economic vitality and undermine our civil and economic liberties.
Robert Higgs
#86. The lesson of 9/11 is that America is truly exceptional. We withstood the worst attack of our history, intended by our enemies to destroy us. Instead, it drew us closer and made us more united. Our love for freedom and one another has given us a strength that surprised even ourselves.
Rudy Giuliani
#87. If History teaches any lesson at all, it is that there are no historical lessons.
Lucien Febvre
#89. For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.
Philip Short
#90. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
