Top 88 History Perspective Quotes
#1. The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history.
John Shelby Spong
#2. From a reality perspective, I'm sure part of that is true, but this is the largest blackout in U.S. history. If that is not a signal that we have got a problem that needs to be fixed, I don't know what is.
Jennifer Granholm
#3. Every company has its own texture, vocabulary, and singular place in dance history, and I have always wanted to share my perspective of these world renowned institutions.
David Hallberg
#4. Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.
Otto Von Bismarck
#5. These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.
Clara Bingham
#6. Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.
William Kristol
#7. History has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered, were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political oppression and economic slavery.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
#8. The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.
Robert J. Allison
#9. Ignorant of history, we find it easy to accept our isolation from one another. We are more able to recognize differences than shared experiences and perspectives. History proclaims our common humanity.
Linda Simon
#10. Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.
Simon Schama
#11. With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families, innocents going about their lives, suddenly and brutally murdered, no other day can ever matter as much.
Jon Meacham
#12. As the Greeks saw it, to be a man was to be defined by your ability to exert power in a world articulated through transcendent forces ultimately beyond human control. The apparent futility of this perspective was outweighed by the nobility that came with the struggle.
Thomas Van Nortwick
#13. I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine.
Gideon Glick
#14. THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history.
Anita Shreve
#15. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.
W.G. Sebald
#16. Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.
Ian Mortimer
#17. He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.
George Eliot
#18. With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes.
Peter Heather
#19. Looking again at the lights and the shadows, in both one's own life and in the history of the past century, gives a person perspective to face the end of life on earth in the light of eternity.
Francis George
#20. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is a matter of perspective: it all depends on the observer and the verdict of history.
Pentti Linkola
#21. You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.
Donald Miller
#22. Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.
J.M. Blaut
#23. History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
Joseph Joubert
#24. Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.
J.J. Scarisbrick
#25. EMBRACING THE EXISTING Japanese perspective on urban history and context
Kengo Kuma
#26. If there were ever such a thing as a unique opinion, history would probably be less inclined to repeat itself.
Gavin Mills
#27. The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.
Agatha Christie
#28. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
#29. To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.
Irving R. Kaufman
#30. Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.
Arthur F. Holmes
#31. Our sense of history has grown dangerously thin, and our sense of proportion with it.
Stephen L. Carter
#32. What happens tomorrow is the future but what happened yesterday is already part of on-going history ...
Peggy Herbert
#33. Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do.
Ian McEwan
#35. It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.
Thomas L. Friedman
#36. The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.
Emmuska Orczy
#37. There is nothing quite like a dose of unvarnished history for inoculating people against the tendency to indict the present for failing to measure up to a sentimental notion of the past.
George F. Will
#38. The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible.
William Manchester
#39. In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos
George F. Will
#40. The accumulation of facts, even if interesting in themselves, should not constitute the main part of education; these facts, whether they be of classical learning or knick-knacks of history, will be of little use unless the mind has been trained to see them in proper perspective.
Arthur Lynch
#41. Countries who have a longer past are better able see further forward into the future and think about extending the time period that they've already been around into the distant future.
Hal Hershfield
#42. The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.
Noam Chomsky
#43. With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.
Richard Rohr
#44. Not every murderer is known, not every death is recorded, not every human being in the history of mankind is remembered and not every God's name is memorised by me. That doesn't mean they don't exist, Dr.Mukherjee.
Sambhav Ratnakar
#45. The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
#46. There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.
Donald Worster
#47. History is written by victors," said Duko. "But I have little use for history. It is the future with which I am concerned.
Raymond E. Feist
#48. We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.
Criss Jami
#49. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#50. Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
Andre Malraux
#51. I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this.
Josh Radnor
#52. History is the view from the cheap seats. Distance from the action provides a unique perspective; one can recognize the plays and appreciate the totality of certain events.
Debra Komar
#53. I went further and further back through the centuries to get a sense of perspective but now at least I understand why Irish history evokes such strong passions and emotions.
James D'arcy
#54. He found his irritation that the American memory could be short.
James Carl Nelson
#55. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
#56. Why would you create a movie for black people if you don't understand the history and perspective of the people you are doing it for? You need historical perspective to make sound decisions.
Tim Reid
#57. As you grow older and young people come up to you with their history books, you realize that some of the things I have been able to do have been impactful. But for me, I try to keep everything in perspective and stay humble.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
#58. I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Niall Ferguson
#59. 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
#60. The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.
Harold Holzer
#61. Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective.
Mohsin Hamid
#62. The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.
Megan Smolenyak
#63. 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
#64. For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
Davis Bunn
#65. I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
#66. In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.
Megan Smolenyak
#67. One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".
Andrew Roberts
#68. The power of the story sheds a light and great perspective on well known facts. The power of cinema draws on that collective history.
Cate Blanchett
#69. The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
Niall Ferguson
#70. Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history.
Gough Whitlam
#71. History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.
Janet Flanner
#72. My ancestors were conquerors, though now they are heroes in our history." Glancing at Amos, he said, "But we wrote the history.
Raymond E. Feist
#73. History reveals there is no moral high ground; there is only perspective. We often exhibit the same behaviors for which we condemn others.
Steve Maraboli
#74. If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear.
Kathleen Rooney
#75. History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
Bruce Catton
#76. No matter how good a public school teacher, he or she will always be required to teach the state's values and the state's perspective on subjects from sex to history and biology.
Cal Thomas
#77. Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history. Georges Pompidou
Mark Kurlansky
#78. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.
Andrew Roberts
#79. I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling.
Na'ama Yehuda
#80. Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Philip Zaleski
#81. Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.
Bernard-Henri Levy
#82. There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.
Walter Isaacson
#83. History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.
Edmund Burke
#84. The beauty of history is that it can be altered by changing ones perspective. If the interpretation varies so does the impact. Free will is the governor.
Truth Devour
#85. No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.
Will Durant
#86. For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.
John Edgar Wideman
#87. The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.
Warren W. Wiersbe
#88. The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence
T. S. Eliot
