Our History Quotes

#1. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#2. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If

Kay Redfield Jamison

#3. Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#4. 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

#5. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!

Jack London

#6. The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

Jon Meacham

#7. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.

Gil Scott-Heron

#8. 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

#9. For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

Jimmy Carter

#10. 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

#11. No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them.

Jessie Bernard

#12. history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains

Philip Parker

#13. Kip Keino, Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, they all come from my tribe. Some say it is the food we eat that makes us strong, the way we live. In the history of our people we wear no clothes and we are used to drinking the blood of animals.

Martin Lel

#14. For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.

J. William Schopf

#15. 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

#16. The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe ...

William Lane Craig

#17. Some of the greatest spiritual revivals in the past occurred just when the situation seemed to be the darkest. In the history of our own nation, for example, countless thousands turned to Christ during the darkest days of the Civil War, setting the stage for national reconciliation later on.

Billy Graham

#18. 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

#19. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians.

Marie Colvin

#20. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

M. King Hubbert

#21. The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.

James Hutton

#22. 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

#23. In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

Edmund Burke

#24. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?

Daniel Quinn

#25. 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

#26. Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.

Alfred De Vigny

#27. However, I must say that I am very happy to see that we have such a positive result for our first referendum in our history and that gives me more confidence in Taiwan's democracy.

Chen Shui-bian

#28. The Xanthus or Scamander is not a mere dry channel and bed of a mountain torrent, but fed by the ever-flowing springs of fame ...
and I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much abused Concord River with the most famous in history.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. An ordinary Turk, an ordinary Arab, an ordinary Tunisian can change history. We believe that democracy is good, and that our people deserve it.

Ahmet Davutoglu

#30. If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#31. The religious foundations of America have been completely expurgated from our history textbooks.

D. James Kennedy

#32. 5126We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas.

Iain M. Banks

#33. There is humor in the specter of the worst disaster in our nation's history. All I have to do is sweep away the debris of shock to find it.

Will Durst

#34. 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

#35. History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. To keep the peace, we and our allies must be strong enough to convince any potential aggressor that war could bring no benefit, only disaster.

Ronald Reagan

#36. The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.

Branch Rickey

#37. What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

George Orwell

#38. History affects our future but it doesn't determine it.

Todd Stocker

#39. 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

#40. If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Terry Eagleton

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.

Paul Graham

#45. The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Vivienne Westwood

#46. Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision

Harry Crews

#47. 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

#48. The world wants disarmament, the world needs disarmament. We have it in our power to help fashion future history.

Arthur Henderson

#49. If inciting people to do that is terrorism, and if killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.

Osama Bin Laden

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. When we love all parts of ourselves, when we bless all of ourselves, when we honor all of our history and all of our insecurities, doubts, worries, and fears, we become the women that we always wanted to be.

Debbie Ford

#53. We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

Constance Baker Motley

#54. I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I don't think the libertarians have it right when it comes to what the Constitution's all about. I don't think they have it right as to what our history is.

Rick Santorum

#55. Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.

David Christian

#56. 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

#57. We act unbelievingly and disobediently when, for whatever motive, we distort, falsify, or suppress the facts about our life in nature and history.

Karl Barth

#58. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.

Lionel Tiger

#59. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.

Polykarp Kusch

#60. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Bill Moyers

#61. I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley.

Terry Tempest Williams

#62. I'm a child of immigrants. That is the history of this country. Immigration is good and important for our country. Legal immigration needs to really be modernized.

John Barrasso

#63. Since the birth of our Nation, no other right has been more important than having the ability to vote. Unfortunately, as history has shown, the denial of this right to minorities is a scar on our system of democracy.

Jan Schakowsky

#64. More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors.

M.F. Moonzajer

#65. My brother's researched our early family history. He found a letter from a fella who said he used to be in love with my mum.

Paul McCartney

#66. 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

#67. Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.

Samuel Noah Kramer

#68. [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

#69. We got 16,000 wonderful vehicles. We got all the steel that we make our tanks out of. Of course, we couldn't have done without Western aid.

Georgy Zhukov

#70. 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

#71. There's a few in our history, where the person who creates it becomes almost the product itself. Jobs is one of those.

Joshua Michael Stern

#72. Our personal history does not inhibit our present or our future. Don't let anyone (including yourself) tell you you can't do something. Find your passion and take action everyday to work towards achieving your life purpose.

Miya Yamanouchi

#73. I get people to this day - I won my title 25 years ago - saying how wonderful a time they had during that dark period in our history when they came to watch me fight.

Barry McGuigan

#74. We gotta control inflation, quit spending our money on everything. But this years tax increase, why it's the biggest in history.

Hank Williams Jr.

#75. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

Miles Davis

#76. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.

Octavio Paz

#77. 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

#78. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Yvette Clarke

#79. 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

#80. Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people ... We are a nation rich in rivers.

Charles Kuralt

#81. When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.

William Howard Taft

#82. I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

Beau Bridges

#83. In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

Adam Sisman

#84. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Steven Pinker

#85. Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

Sloane Crosley

#86. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.

Tommy Lapid

#87. 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

#88. History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago.

Kim Thuy

#89. We do not want to comprehend that people may and do die of emotional pain, or to recognize the terror in ourselves when we cannot seem to help someone in despair
when our words are empty.

Jill Bialosky

#90. Our history suggests that women will continue to show the world how to be friends.

Marilyn Yalom

#91. At the heart of world time is the momentum of history. At the heart of personal time is the mystery and wonder of individuality. At the heart of deep, new time is the creative spirit. But at the heart of our time is love.

David Spangler

#92. As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don't want our blunders in history to get repeated.

Gloria Estefan

#93. In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.

Louise Bernikow

#94. We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is.

William Vogt

#95. The cosmos is three times as old as Earth. During most of creation's 14 billion year history, our solar system wasn't around. Nonetheless, the early universe still had the right stuff for life, and contained worlds that were just as suitable for spawning biology and intelligence as our own.

Seth Shostak

#96. I'm driven by history and our past. That's why I work in gold. It's in your veins. We've been lusting after gold since the beginning of time. God, glory, and gold.

Waris Ahluwalia

#97. In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.

Eyvind Johnson

#98. After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.

Genesis P-Orridge

#99. After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past?

Robert Dale Owen

#100. We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.

Anne Lamott