Top 100 History Past Present Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#5. 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
#6. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#7. The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#8. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
Eamon Duffy
#12. For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
Davis Bunn
#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. Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.
Jim Rohn
#15. Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
#16. History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.
Aidan Chambers
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. That's what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar ... Because there's more past than present there. Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?
Kamila Shamsie
#21. 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
#22. First, I look at history the way I look at evolution. Some things die out for a good reason, and should be left dead. I put dictatorships and velociraptors in the same category: leave them in the past, where they can serve as frightening object lessons for the present.
Holly Lisle
#23. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form ... The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.
[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]
Jean-Henri Fabre
#24. 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
#25. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.
Gary DeMar
#26. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.
Eric Metaxas
#27. 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
#28. All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
#29. 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. 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
#32. We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
Criss Jami
#33. The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.
Anatol Lieven
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
Leopold Von Ranke
#38. I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.
Glen Cook
#39. History is meaningless unless you discern how the past shapes the present.
Rory Clements
#40. 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
#41. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past
Tom McCarthy
#42. I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.
Augustine Birrell
#43. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
#44. [T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.
Fritz Stern
#45. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.
Zadie Smith
#46. You don't rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
V.T. Davy
#48. We must delve deep into history the better to engage a true dialogue of civilisations. Fear of the present can impose upon the past its own biased vision.
Tariq Ramadan
#49. 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
#50. For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#51. History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present.
David Von Drehle
#52. The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past.
Jean-Henri Fabre
#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. You are not responsible for the past, but insofar as you do nothing, you are complicit in the present created by it.
Jonathan R. Miller
#56. Is any history really all that ancient? ... Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?
Margaret Peterson Haddix
#58. The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#59. Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people's stories.
Randy Alcorn
#60. 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
#61. The lessons of past is critical for teachings in present. And experience in the future.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#62. 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
#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. Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#66. 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
#67. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#69. Contrary to popular belief: Knowing where you are from will not really tell you where you are going. It will merely tell you why you are where you are.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
Russell Hoban
#73. 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
#74. In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
Anthony Doerr
#75. There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.
John Robinson
#76. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
R. Scott Bakker
#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. 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
#81. 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
#82. I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.
Claire Tomalin
#83. 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
#84. To THOSE who want to lift this nation from the dungheap of history, the past does not matter - only the present, the awareness of the deadening rot which surrounds and suffocates us, and what we must do to vanquish it.
F. Sionil Jose
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. The past is history. The future is a mystery. The present is a gift.
Lisa Unger
#88. We study the past ecological history, with the conscience of the present ecological conditions. The key to predict future aquatic ecosystem changes.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#89. All the rain that fell since the world began won't cure today's drought.
Marty Rubin
#90. 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
#91. He always says that those who control the present can rewrite the past.
Anne Fortier
#92. History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.
Christopher Hill
#93. 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
#94. We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#95. Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.
Richard White
#96. History is important because it teaches us about the past. And bylearning about the past, you come to understand the present, so that you may make educated decisions about the future.
Richelle Mead
#97. He had understood long ago that the past was no better than the present. That was as plain as day. One had to try to escape, to wrestle free from every era, so as not to be devoured by it.
Lyudmila Ulitskaya
#98. We study the past history, with the conscience of the present environmental changes; we can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#99. History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.
Ken Burns
#100. Waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
Dennis Lehane
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top