Top 100 Human History Quotes
#1. Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.
Joe Haldeman
#3. More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that is why we have the United Nations.
Kofi Annan
#4. I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity-a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history-but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#5. You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.
John Edward Williams
#6. But children grow up too, and they too must learn from history how easy it is for human beings to be transformed into inhuman beings through incitement and intolerance.
E.H. Gombrich
#7. Take away the Holocaust and what do you have left? Without their precious Holocaust, what are the Jews? Just a grubby little bunch of international bandits and assassins and squatters who have perpetrated the most massive, cynical fraud in human history.
Harold Covington
#8. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#9. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.
Steven Pinker
#10. [I want to build] the biggest apparel company in human history.
Kanye West
#12. History is filled with tragic examples of wars that result from diplomatic impasse. Whether in our local communities or in international relations, the skillful use of our communicative capacities to negotiate and resolve differences is the first evidence of human wisdom.
Daisaku Ikeda
#13. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#14. Conventional history completely ignores half the human race.
Barbara Mertz
#15. Sex drives the world and sex in on every human mind, be it a prophet or be it a saint, history has full of evidences.
Santosh Kalwar
#16. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.
Barbara Jordan
#17. Moreover, if we could show, on general logical grounds, that the scientific quest is likely to succeed, one could not understand why anything like success has been so rare in the long history of human endeavours to know more about our world.
Karl R. Popper
#18. Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
H.G.Wells
#19. Because the human history is the history of shoes. The history of places where we ever tread and stand.
Stebby Julionatan
#20. There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.
Jonathan Trigell
#21. It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)
Robin R. Meyers
#22. There are more people living in freedom today than at any other time in the history of the human race.
Mike Rounds
#23. As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
Elizabeth Kostova
#24. Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.
Javier Perez De Cuellar
#25. Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down - or up, I suppose - replacing other people in the process.
Alexander McCall Smith
#26. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.
Yuval Noah Harari
#27. If miracles represent prophecy, we must have more prophets in twenty first century than the entire human history.
M.F. Moonzajer
#28. After all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history.
Condoleezza Rice
#29. It would be right to say that the helicopter's role in saving lives represents one of the most glorious pages in the history of human flight.
Igor Sikorsky
#30. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.
Robert Kennedy
#31. In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history.
Frank Herbert
#32. 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
#33. We will be remembered not for the power of our weapons but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to human welfare.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#34. I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.
David Christian
#35. It's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle. p28
Donna Tartt
#36. In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
Stefan Zweig
#37. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.
Judy Chicago
#38. 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
#39. Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
#40. Is there in all the history of human folly a greater fool than a clergymen in politics?
Pat Robertson
#41. During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well
Walter Benjamin
#42. The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion.
Terence McKenna
#43. Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation.
Vidkun Quisling
#44. Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.
Llewellyn Rockwell
#45. [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
#46. 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
#47. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
#48. Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women's rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race.
Jack Holland
#49. Out of all the medical advancements in human history I'm still most in awe of that tiny little piece of toilet paper that can stop a gushing razor cut in its tracks.
Gregor Collins
#50. Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
Alice Dreger
#51. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru)
Carolina De Robertis
#52. History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma
Aldous Huxley
#53. Paleo is not a diet. It's not a fad. It's not a rigid set of rules to follow. It's not a sound bite. It's an exploration of history, nutrition, the human diet, and, most important, our health.
Liz Wolfe
#54. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
Eamon Duffy
#55. The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.
Karl Popper
#56. Americans believe with all their heart, the vast majority of them, and the vast majority of Floridians, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history.
Marco Rubio
#57. History is, after all, something that happened to people. No 'force' whether economic or political can act except as it acts through the minds and bodies of human beings.
Priscilla Smith Robertson
#58. History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
Milan Kundera
#59. I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
Gerard Donovan
#60. Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
C.V. Wedgwood
#61. The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.
David Attenborough
#62. To seal the deal I employed one of the most powerful tools available to canines riding in cars; it's called the "leanin." No human in the history of dog/owner relations has ever been able to speak negatively of their dog after experiencing it.
Bo Hoefinger
#63. The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.
Richard L. Currier
#64. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
Will Durant
#65. Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.
Joy DeGruy
#66. We're at a point in history that whether the Internet is going to evolve in a way that's compatible with democracy and human rights is really kind of up in the air.
Rebecca MacKinnon
#67. The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
Augustus William Hare
#68. Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.
Sylvia Earle
#69. It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.
Louis De Bernieres
#70. Philosophy alone can boast (and perhaps it is no more than the boast of philosophy), that her gentle hand is able to eradicate from the human mind the latent and deadly principle of fanaticism.
Edward Gibbon
#71. This is the biggest cemetery for Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti. It must tell us that we have to come back here again and again. We must keep the memory of the worst crime in human history alive for those who were born later.
Horst Kohler
#72. This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.
Jonas Salk
#73. Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.
Michel Faber
#75. History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.
Eldridge Cleaver
#76. Love is eternal. It has been the strongest motivation for human actions throughout history. Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death.
Vera Caspary
#77. Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history.
Mary Douglas
#79. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#80. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#81. There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history.
Peter Singer
#82. The equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought.
Stephen Jay Gould
#83. Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
P. J. O'Rourke
#84. It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions.
Dan Barker
#85. Reach into your pocket, a few taps on your smartphone, and you can know anything. We are all omniscient. I have the complete repository of human history sitting two inches away from my dick all day, every day.
Robert Brockway
#86. The idea that we have the right to inflict suffering and death on other sentient beings for the trivial reasons of palate pleasure and fashion is, without doubt, one of the most arrogant and morally repugnant notions in the history of human thought.
Gary L. Francione
#87. I'm convinced that none of the important achievements in human history were accomplished before ten-thirty or eleven in the morning!"17
Bob Ward
#88. It's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior.
Scarlett Johansson
#89. But as history clearly shows, most people, whether because of nature or nurture, generally put their own interests ahead of others'. This doesn't make them bad people; it just makes them human.
Steven D. Levitt
#90. History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.
Margaret MacMillan
#91. Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.
Geoffrey Elton
#92. To some Humans, the promise of a patch land was worth any effort. It was an oddly predictable sort of behavior. Humans had a long, storied history of forcing their way into places where they didn't belong.
Becky Chambers
#93. If citizens followed their leaders' example throughout history, the human race would have died out centuries ago.
Heather Brewer
#94. President Gordon B. Hinckley spoke of its relationship to other events in world history: When all is said and done, when all of history is examined, when the deepest depths of the human mind have been explored, there is nothing so wonderful, so majestic, so tremendous as this act of grace.
Tad R. Callister
#96. Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man.
Paul Verhoeven
#97. The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.
Rick Strassman
#98. Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.
Louise J. Kaplan
#99. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#100. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.
Victor Hugo
