Top 100 History Truth Quotes
#1. I could drop dead tomorrow, the truth will be here. Truth is forever; when you read our history, truth is forever, and it always outs itself.
Paul Mooney
#2. We like to imagine that in history, truth will prevail through sheer persuasive power. Sadly, this is not the case. Truth needs champions ...
Llewellyn Rockwell
#3. In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost ... especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.
Col. Thomas Aspinwall
#4. [T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
Jacques Barzun
#5. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#6. History is written by the victors,' she said, 'but the truth has a way of revealing itself.
Sebastien De Castell
#7. History matters. It matters whether we tell the truth about what happened centuries ago, and it matters whether we tell the truth about more recent history. It matters because if we can't we will never be able to face the present, guaranteeing that our future will be doomed.
Robert Jensen
#8. [M]ore wars have been waged, more people killed, and more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. The sad truth continues in our present day.
Charles Kimball
#9. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
George Orwell
#10. One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.
Albert Schweitzer
#11. The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.
Nikola Tesla
#12. Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history
Michel Foucault
#13. In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.
Henry James Sumner Maine
#14. The most important events in every age never reach the history books.
C.S. Lewis
#15. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another
physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.
Toni Morrison
#16. Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies. It gives us the promise and prospect of a transcendent world - far beyond the limits of our human experience - and it remains human, all too human.
Ernst Cassirer
#17. History is not a fixed truth. It changes with the speaker.
Jenn Reese
#18. Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments.
Horace Mann
#19. History is written by the victors, the strongest, the most determined. Truth is found most often in the silence, in the quiet places.
Kate Mosse
#20. Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.
Svetlana Alexievich
#22. You see, Suzanne, history lectures bore me, art films bore me, your friends bore me, and, if you want to know the truth, I guess you bore me too.
Francine Pascal
#23. Many Christians with Ph.D.'s have simply absorbed a two-track approach to their subject, treating science or sociology or history as though it consisted of religiously neutral knowledge, where biblical truth has nothing important to say.
Nancy Pearcey
#24. The cruelest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. Making name for yourself requires you not to stop and consider you have done enough but rather continue to move forward
Sunday Adelaja
#26. There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.
Rebecca Wells
#27. Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.
Rivka Galchen
#28. I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
Jean Cocteau
#29. Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines "freedom," "truth," "intelligence," "fact," "wisdom," "memory," "history" - all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.
Neil Postman
#30. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.
Jodi Picoult
#32. From history books you should at best believe just the punctuation. The rest is uncertain, incomplete, distorted, exaggerated or even fabricated.
A.J. Beirens
#33. We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
William Hazlitt
#34. An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. [ ... ] that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil.
George R R Martin
#35. The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
#36. History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Jean Cocteau
#37. And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.
Jaroslav Hasek
#38. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
Francis Parkman
#39. If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
E. O. Wilson
#41. The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.
Herbert Butterfield
#42. History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Victor Hugo
#43. The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old.
William Pfaff
#44. The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#45. As I said, history is written by the victors. The truth is, the villains were less villainous, and the heroes less heroic, than you've been told.
Cinda Williams Chima
#46. One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
#47. It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Robert Fisk
#48. Truth can never be confined to time and culture; in history it is known, but it also reaches beyond history.
Pope John Paul II
#49. I'm convinced the true history of our time isn't what we read in newspapers or books ... True history is almost invisible. It flows like an underground spring. It takes place in the shadows, and in silence, George. And only a chosen few know what that history is.
Felix J. Palma
#50. All she's caught is fleas! She's a medicine cat, not a warrior. She should be helping me, not trying to pretend that her entire history vanished on the day the truth came out.
Erin Hunter
#51. Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#52. Witches is being sold as an account of the Belvoir scandals, but in truth, Tracy Borman has written a thorough and beautifully researched social history of the early 1600s, taking in everything from folk medicine to James I's sex life.
Bella Bathurst
#53. The first law of history is to dread uttering a falsehood; the next is not to fear stating the truth; lastly, the historian's writings should be open to no suspicion of partiality or animosity.
Pope Leo XIII
#54. In writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor ...
Philip Pullman
#55. Immigration reform doesn't impact me personally; nothing my foundation works on does. But the truth is I have a long history of ties to Latin America. Some of my best friends are in Latin America.
Howard Graham Buffett
#56. History will remember you for your accomplishments, not for your ability.
Debasish Mridha
#57. He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver
#58. The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.
Frank Rich
#59. Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity.
Edmund Leach
#60. An Idea is nothing but Information, It won't do us any harm until we accept it as perception of truth in our mind, which in time will potentially evolve and construct major events in history.
Djayawarman Alamprabu
#61. Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.
Tadeusz Pankiewicz
#62. Real science studies and makes accessible that knowledge which people at that period of history think important, and real art transfers this truth from the domain of knowledge to the domain of feelings.
Leo Tolstoy
#63. If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.
Gerald Vann
#64. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History
Sebastian Barry
#65. The oppressed peoples can liberate themselves only through struggle. This is a simple and clear truth confirmed by history.
Kim Il-sung
#66. History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce
#67. Our City has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District. Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most peopke find sin. - taxi driver
John Green
#68. The only advice I can give you ... is to examine who you are ... Figure out what's important to you. Know yourselves. Know what's in your heart. Don't be swayed by fear or history or the opinions of outsiders. Find your own truth. It will lead you to the things you love.
J-Ax
#69. If Church history teaches us anything, it is that we cannot afford to be a vacillating Church. We minister to a people who are in great need of hearing truth, we dare not make any attempt to soft pedal that glorious truth.
Martin Luther
#70. Everything we know has come from stories that have been told over and over again as truth. Those stories turn into history.
Oliver Jeffers
#71. The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.
Jodi Picoult
#72. Baby boomers selling your rumors of their history, forcein' youth away from the truth of what's real today
Mike Watt
#73. Though the island of Great Britain exhibits but a small spot upon the map of the globe, it makes a splendid appearance in the history of mankind, and for a long space has been signally under the protection of God and a seat of peace, liberty and truth.
John Newton
#74. We demand that sex speak the truth [ ... ] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.
Michel Foucault
#75. As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.
Kate Atkinson
#76. I will lay it out in black and white, and my tale will contain more truth than the great dead histories on my father's bookshelves. For they say what happened, but not what it was like. They say what happened, but they do not say why.
Beth Underdown
#77. Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.
Catherynne M Valente
#78. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have ... a recipe for the fall of civilization.
Sam Harris
#79. Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
Edward Gibbon
#80. There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.
Honore De Balzac
#81. Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.
Sarah Dunant
#82. The truth is not simply visible to the naked eyes, not any more. When people believe so much in media reports, history itself may conceal the truth only the chosen ones can see.
Aishah Madadiy
#84. < ... > black slavery was basic and integral to the entire phenomenon we call "America." This often hidden or disguised truth ultimately involves the profound contradiction of a free society that was made possible by black slave labor.
David Brion Davis
#85. I don't think we can build much of a future,' says Shara, 'without knowing the truth of the past. It's time to be honest about what the world really was, and what it is now.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#86. 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
#87. If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.
Allan Nevins
#88. In the New Testament, myth stands over against the truth of the history of Jesus Christ ... the decisive die has ... been already cast in the New Testament opposition to myth.
G. C. Berkouwer
#89. The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
#90. The time is not come for impartial history. If the truth were told just now, it would not be credited.
Robert E.Lee
#91. Tell the Truth. Make it Special.
Life's a Beach. And then you Drown.
Good Ideas cost no more than Bad Ones.
Justin Allison
#92. There were three things sought by invaders who crossed
oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory.
There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens
to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.
Toba Beta
#93. The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them ...
Susan Sontag
#95. Memory is the most potent truth.
Show me history untouched by memories
and you show me lies.
Carlos Eire
#96. A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.
Tom Harpur
#97. The truth is, we are part of something greater than our own personal preferences or felt needs. We are part of a worldwide family of believers who belong to each other with a history and a heritage defined by a loving heavenly Father.
Ross Parsley
#99. Making a name for yourself comes from working hard
Sunday Adelaja
#100. -to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!
Richard Flanagan
