Important Historical Quotes

#1. Most fourth graders can't say why Abraham Lincoln is an important historical figure? Wow. This is far more distressing than if the news had been that fourth graders were bad at reciting multiplication tables, because you can, in fact, Google that.

Susan Orlean

#2. Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history.

Samuel E. Morison

#3. If we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.

Karen Armstrong

#4. Spain is an important historical ally of the United States, and if confirmed, I will add to our more than 200 years of diplomatic history to further our shared interests.

James Costos

#5. Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

Hu Shih

#6. Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

Raymond Queneau

#7. I think it's important to recognise that 'The Da Vinci Code' opened up a vast new audience for a general readership interested in historical detective stories and research into history.

Elizabeth Kostova

#8. The motives of the writer form as important an ingredient in the analysis or his history, as the facts he records. Probability is a powerful and troublesome test; and it is by this troublesome standard that a large portion of historical evidence is sifted.

Homer

#9. You don't have to know people personally for them to be role models. Some of my most important role models were historical or literary figures that I only read about - never actually met.

John Wilson

#10. He liked churchyards. The graves themselves, were, of course, important, being the final resting places for the earthly remains of people-real people just like himself. They were valuable tributes from loving relatives, who'd cared about those people in life; the gravestones were historical records.

Charmian Hussey

#11. Californias red-legged frogs are part of our historical, literary and cultural heritage, ... It is critically important that we ensure that there will always be frogs jumping here in Calaveras County, and in other places, too.

Robert Stack

#12. Both oral and written stories are an important aspect of culture. Stories are a ubiquitous component of human communication. People use stories to explain historical events and to illustrate ideology. Stories teach ethical principles through parables.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#13. I have no intention of selling any more of the historical Apollo 11 items in my possession for the remainder of my life. I intend to pass a portion of these items on to my children and to loan the most important items for permanent display in suitable museums around the country.

Buzz Aldrin

#14. I think it is vitally important to study History. If we are going to lead Britain safely into the future, it is essential that we understand our country's historical roots. If we can learn the lessons of the past, we will be able to avoid making mistakes in the future.

Tony Blair

#15. You realise Group Captain that this might be the most important weather forecast in history?

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#16. Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars ... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

Richard Dawkins

#17. Telling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle.

Linda Hogan

#18. One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.

Alix Kates Shulman

#19. This cannot be stated too strongly: From the very beginning, Christianity tied itself to history. The most important claims of Christianity are historical claims, and on the facts of history the Christian religion must stand or fall.

Kevin DeYoung

#20. It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

Jacqueline Winspear

#21. I think the important thing is to realize that the establishment of a democracy is sometimes a messy thing and it takes time. Yeah, we've been at it 240 years.

Mike Huckabee

#22. When your child comes home to talk about life, what could be more important?

Destin Bays

#23. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is forgery.

Hannah Arendt

#24. The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

Gary Wolf

#25. The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

Frank Macfarlane Burnet

#26. To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

#27. All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.

Bertrand Russell

#28. it is important to stress that history is always constructed, not absolute or unchallangeable. Histories are stories about the past, and reconstructing the past ill involve elements of mythologising from the cultural, political and theoretical stances of both the historian and the informants.

John O'Toole

#29. This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.

Joseph Campbell

#30. It is important for a woman to have the duplicity to make good use of whatever gifts she might have, however valueless they might seem... You have to have the inner strength to pursue your goal, and not care how many enemies you make along the road. It is not easy.

Anne O'Brien

#31. The chief problem in historical honesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of 'important', of course, depends on one's values.

Howard Zinn

#32. For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

Michael Rostovtzeff

#33. No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important.

Mark Kostabi

#34. She had wanted more than she could have.
She had wanted him, and more ... she had wanted him to want her.
In the name of something bigger than tradition, bolder than reputation, more important than a silly title.

Sarah MacLean

#35. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

John Green

#36. History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.

Alfred Kazin

#37. Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Hilary Mantel

#38. The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.

Hamid Dabashi

#39. There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.

Chloe Schama

#40. History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past ... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Alan Bullock

#41. It is important to remember that the Pacific Ocean covers a quarter of the world's surface and that each Pacific country has its own cultural, historical and ethnic identity.

Jenny Shipley

#42. We British play an important role in Europe, even if we have a traditional and historical ambivalence towards the continent.

Lionel Barber

#43. It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

Warren Christopher

#44. Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

Rick Perlstein

#45. I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#46. Why do you assume I'm human?
I wasn't born; I was created just like this.
First I was an idea.
Then I came into being, charged with a very important task.
I've come to find the monster.

Eliza Granville

#47. The text is merely one of the contexts of a piece of literature, its lexical or verbal one, no more or less important than the sociological, psychological, historical, anthropological or generic.

Leslie Fiedler

#48. Remember, morality is God's standard, not humankind's standard. So it is important that we understand the process that God used to bring us his wisdom, truth and historical perspective.

Reid A. Ashbaucher

#49. One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

George Crumb

#50. The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as
drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period.

Erich Fromm