Top 100 History Was Quotes
#1. When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.
Sarah Vowell
#2. The cold war was the longest war in United States history. Because of the nuclear capabilities of our enemy it was the most dangerous conflict our country ever faced. Those that won this war did so in obscurity. Those that gave their lives in the cold war have never been properly honored.
Harry Reid
#3. Yeah, I suppose it was a history. I wanted it to be more of a geography, but she kept slappin' my hand.' Trev
Terry Pratchett
#4. History was what had happened; class was something you read about in a book.
Amit Chaudhuri
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#8. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.
Mark Twain
#9. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
#10. There are some days when history is made. Yesterday was one - and I was honoured to be in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in. During his soaring inaugural address, the new president gazed over a teeming National Mall that was crowded with more than a million people.
Des Browne
#11. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.
Bruce Catton
#12. If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.
Fidel Castro
#13. No, my degree was history, not the practice of art! I can't draw to save my life you know.
Emma Anderson
#14. The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.
Michael Greger
#15. My whole thing is I want to affect history in a positive way. I want the timeline to be, 100 years from now, when we look back, it's going to be like, the world was like this, and then Shameik Moore hit the world, and everything changed for the better. It was a new light. Something special.
Shameik Moore
#16. For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.
J. William Schopf
#17. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.
Gail Carriger
#18. He shot everything that moved in a blind fury. It was as if he were floating outside his body, his flesh acting on pure animal instinct. To kill or be killed. It was exhilarating.
Rebecca M. Gibson
#19. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#20. The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.
Robert Kennedy
#21. People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
Natasha Trethewey
#22. A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. - Froude's History of England, ch. i.
William Hurrell Mallock
#23. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."
Ronald Reagan
#24. So much history behind and between people, one moment was always a nasty echo of another time, most of who you were already scripted.
Nalo Hopkinson
#25. It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.
Terence McKenna
#26. How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.
Winston S. Churchill
#27. My father was a history professor, and my mother a housewife -
She married a house?
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#28. By the time I was about ten, I had started to lose faith with church ways. I was educated in some ways by my high school government and history teachers.
Ronee Blakley
#29. It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.
Karl Pilkington
#30. History reveals no civilized people among whom there was not a highly educated class and large aggregations of wealth. Large profits mean large payrolls.
Calvin Coolidge
#31. In a day and age when, unfortunately, so few write letters or keep a diary any longer, the Wright Papers stand as a striking reminder of a time when that was not the way and of the immense value such writings can have in bringing history to life.
David McCullough
#32. I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.
Will Hobbs
#33. The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.
Carroll Quigley
#34. The 1850s proved to be the decade of the most prolific patent litigation in America's history. Lincoln himself was involved, as well as his most three prolific cabinet members: Chase, Seward and Stanton.
Darin Gibby
#35. I love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.
Shakira
#36. Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems.
Fritjof Capra
#37. Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.
James Rollins
#38. In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
Read more at
Leo Tolstoy
#39. find it interesting that in history all one had to do to discredit a woman was label her a witch. How do we discredit a strong woman today?" The class stared back at Wilson, not understanding. And then it clicked. "You label her a bitch," I offered boldly. The
Amy Harmon
#40. Yeah,there was a whole chapter on you in my eight grade History of Angels textbook," Miles said. Arriane clapped. "And they told me that book was banned!
Lauren Kate
#41. We're all going to die. Most of us will leave no mark of our existence behind what-so-ever. Not a stain or a smudge or a smear on the face of history. I think that's sad." It made Romney horribly regretful to think that the fat man was right.
Oliver Tidy
#42. I have fond memories of growing up in beautiful England. It is very much a part of the fabric of me, even though I left when I was quite young. It's just a very different culture over there, filled with a profound depth of history.
Samantha Newark
#43. Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.
J.G. Ballard
#44. In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.
Haruki Murakami
#45. The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
Bryan Magee
#46. This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.
Naomi Alderman
#47. Churchill's 2,054 page book "Second World War" makes no mention of genocide or the murder of Jews. Coincidentally, Churchill was a strong proponent of eugenic legislation prior to the outbreak of WWII.
A.E. Samaan
#48. Was at the core of primeval beliefs. Its names are as old as history itself ... Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman.
Dan Brown
#49. During the settling of the American colonies, it was said that the Spaniards would first build a church, the Dutch would first build a fort and the English a tavern. Welcome to Charleston, an English colony founded in 1670.
Mark R. Jones
#50. Mention the name George W. Bush in mixed company, and you're likely to spark a lot of debate and emotion - hot and cold, good and bad. Not a lot of neutral reaction. He was elected in the most controversial contest in American electoral history and governed during one of the most tumultuous decades.
Mark McKinnon
#51. When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?
Rebecca McNutt
#52. As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.
Lady Gregory
#53. Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.
Kristin Hannah
#54. Men have said that the cross of Christ was not a heroic thing, but I want to tell you that the cross of Jesus Christ has put more heroism in the souls of men than any other event in human history.
John G. Lake
#55. The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter.
Herbert Croly
#56. If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's bustling. There
Alice McDermott
#57. Ryan [Gosling] has a history with the Mickey Mouse Club. He was a child performer himself. And he took the time to get to know people.
Joel Silver
#59. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. My mother was always deeply attracted to anything medical, and I think she would have loved me to have been a doctor. My father was in the army for 21 years, came out just before I was born. There was no history of showbusiness on either side of the family, but they were completely supportive.
Lindsay Duncan
#61. Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
Jackson Browne
#62. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.
Rachel Maddow
#63. English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off ... Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.
Dave Barry
#64. As for Demonologies: A History, I was beginning to think it would have been better employed as a doorstop.
Rachel Hawkins
#65. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.
A.E. Samaan
#66. The amphibious landing of U.S. Marines on September 1950 at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, was one of the most audacious and spectacularly successful amphibious landings in all naval history.
Bernard Brodie
#67. I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.
Twyla Tharp
#68. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
George Orwell
#69. You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
David Hockney
#70. Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life.
Joseph G. Peterson
#71. Cristiano reminds me of German tennis player Michael Stich. He was destined to make history, but then Boris Becker showed up. Cristiano is so fast, so strong, so incredible, but he has one problem: Leo Messi.
Jurgen Klopp
#72. It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.
Randall Wallace
#73. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
Clive Sinclair
#74. The old man was brilliant at looking somber and energetic at the same time. If he hadn't been the executive of the largest governing body in the history of the human race, he'd have made a killing promoting health drinks.
James S.A. Corey
#75. He said the reason we studied history was to find out why things were the way they were, how we got here. He said you could do anything you wanted to people who didn't know their history. That was the way a totalitarian system worked.
Janet Fitch
#76. The three biggest funerals in Alabama history define the state's contending loyalties, I was told: George Wallace's, Martin Luther King's, and Bear Bryant's.
Paul Theroux
#77. Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century.
Ernst W. Mayr
#78. Edmond just lay there smoking and telling me he loved me without saying anything out loud and if there ever was a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about. The
Meg Rosoff
#79. It was OK for the media to pursue Former President Clinton year after year for lying about a private, consensual sexual affair, but we have five justices who committed one of the biggest crimes in American History, and it ceased to be a big story.
Vincent Bugliosi
#80. A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.
Benjamin Hooks
#81. Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake
Joan Gilbert
#82. I think one of the ways that these young singers got started is that they would end up in clubs. And a lot of them were mafia owned. And so there was almost an unspoken kind of mafia sponsorship, which is just a very interesting part of that area's music history.
John Lloyd Young
#83. In Stalin's Russia racial persecution was often disguised as class warfare. More than 1.5 million members of ethnic minorities died as a result of forced resettlement.
Niall Ferguson
#84. It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.
Terry Pratchett
#85. The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.
Geza Vermes
#86. It is Republicans that have led the fight for women's equality. Go back through history and look at who was the first woman to ever vote, elected to office, go to Congress.
Marsha Blackburn
#87. I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#88. Who was Vardan Mamikonian, and how did he come to play this most crucial role in Armenian history? It may justifiably be said that without his committed leadership, the term "Armenian" today might have referred to no more than an obscure, one-time, Christian people of long past.
Arra Avakian
#89. Just touching that old tree was truly moving to me because when you touch these trees, you have such a sense of the passage of time, of history. It's like you're touching the essence, the very substance of life.
Kim Novak
#90. 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
#91. While Frazier was a man of few words / Ali was a world of mouth / but he found his place in history / Now his heart can express him well / Joe Frazier was a silent warrior / whom Ali silently admired / One could not rise without the other
Muhammad Ali
#92. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#93. Doctors in 1945 would report that one of Berlin's children's favorite games was 'rape.' When they saw a man in uniform
even a Salvation Army uniform
they would start screaming hysterically.
Andrei Cherny
#94. Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.
Robert Anton Wilson
#95. When you tell people you're in history, they give you this pained expression because that was the course they hated in high school. But history can be exciting, intellectually rigorous, and fun.
Robert Darnton
#96. James II's second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books),
Stephen Clarke
#97. If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.
Ruth Reichl
#98. From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#99. I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.
John Lescroart
#100. The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
Nathaniel Branden
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