Political History Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Few dramas in American political history remain more riveting than that of Nixon's exit and Mr. Ford's reaction, at first halting and then decisive, to the looming possibility of a former president on criminal trial for months on end.

Scott Shane

#3. 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

#4. Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.

Michelle Bachelet

#5. Self-proclaimed saviors and other outliers come and go throughout our political history. Occasionally, they're successful; most times, they're not. But the system has rebalanced toward the basic principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy that were set forth by the Founders.

David Ignatius

#6. Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

W. H. Auden

#7. The 2004 Election marks the first time in modern political history that Republican voter turnout matched Democratic turnout in a presidential election year.

Jeff Miller

#8. In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.

Leopold Von Ranke

#9. the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.

Lawrence J. Vale

#10. That is not merely a central tragedy of human existence: It is also the political history of the world.

Dean Koontz

#11. I grew up at a time where I think most people had a social and political conscience. Some of the biggest changes in our country's political history happened at the time I was growing up, so I was raised to be a part of those things and to participate and I will continue to do that as much as I can.

George Clooney

#12. It's unbelievable, there's a book out attacking Gore, when he's the most unfortunate loser in political history.

Vincent Bugliosi

#13. People didn't vote left or right in the election. They voted for putting an end to all the primitive political history.

Fatos Nano

#14. Nixon has enough to overcome in terms of his legacy and his political history. Now he has to overcome the in-fighting between his daughters. It's so sad. There's another obstacle for him to clear.

Monica Crowley

#15. Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics.

Daphne Guinness

#16. Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes

Murray Edelman

#17. Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.

Raymond Pettibon

#18. For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#19. Donald Trump is not a Republican. Donald Trump is not a conservative. Donald Trump is trying to pull off the biggest scam in American political history, basically a con job, where he's trying to take over the Republican Party by telling people he's someone who he is not.

Marco Rubio

#20. Every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions. But normally those people become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce.

Irwin Redlener

#21. I could write the political history of those years based on how Red Label gradually gave way to twelve-year-old Ballantine and then to single malt.

Umberto Eco

#22. If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

Thomas Merton

#23. On the eve of the Civil War, James Parton could write that 'the political history of the United States, for the last thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton's knocker.'

James Parton

#24. Then you have [Donald] Trump. So it could be the tightest, most hazardous race in political history and we can't afford to allow Trump to slither through. So that's where I'm at.

Tom Hayden

#25. Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain.

Carl Sagan

#26. It is a remarkable fact in the political history of man that there is scarcely an instance of a free constitutional government which has been the work exclusively of foresight and wisdom. They have all been the result of a fortunate combination of circumstances.

John C. Calhoun

#27. The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.

Alan Furst

#28. It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

Richard Hofstadter

#29. In America, the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in political history

Russell Kirk

#30. All of political history history can be summed up as a struggle to throw the bad guys out and put the good guys in.

John Pugsley

#31. Our politics is very masculine, very aggressive, and it's very polarizing. And the pace of this development has increased in recent years. Erdogan is, in my eyes, the most polarizing politician in recent Turkish political history.

Elif Safak

#32. Secret Societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history ... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence.

Manly Hall

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

Alfred De Vigny

#34. 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

#35. Two famous happy warriors - Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.

Monica Crowley

#36. While history never repeats itself, political patterns do.

Eric Alterman

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.

Abdumalik Nysanbayev

#40. 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

#41. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#42. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.

Ronald C. White Jr.

#43. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.

Diane Ravitch

#44. Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.

Dan Simmons

#45. No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.

Mao Zedong

#46. But now, as throughout history, financial capacity and political perspicacity are inversely correlated.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#47. No matter how powerful our political and religious leaders think they are, they are as dust before the immense and implacable forces of history and progress. I just hope that they don't make too much of a mess or take too many more people down with them.

Alan Moore

#48. Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican.

Harper Lee

#49. Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.

Thomas Sowell

#50. That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.

Bertrand Russell

#51. Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.

B.W. Powe

#52. Man is a political animal' said Aristotle telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills and with the stars than with other men.

William S. Burroughs

#53. We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food-stamp president in the American history, in Barack Obama, and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.

Newt Gingrich

#54. There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Karl Popper

#55. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.

Thomas Piketty

#56. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

#57. If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

Madeleine Albright

#58. I read and learned and fretted more about Canada after I left than I ever did while I was home. I absorbed anything I could on topics that ranged from Folklore to history to political mainifestos ... I ranted and raved and seethed about things beyond my control. In short I acted like a Canadian.

Will Ferguson

#59. It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

A. N. Wilson

#60. I believe the history of American music is just as important as anything political because it's changed generations of people.

Dave Grohl

#61. My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Camille Paglia

#62. When one nation is at war with another nation, the political machine does everything it can to vilify the people of the other nation, so it makes it easier to kill them. Which is understandable and it's happened this way throughout history.

Alexander Siddig

#63. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.

Ludwig Von Mises

#64. It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.

John Coleman

#65. History causes the military problem to become the essence of the political problem.

Vladimir Lenin

#66. The church, inserted and active in human society and in history, does not exist in order to exercise political power or to govern the society.

Claudio Hummes

#67. History teaches us
that men and nations
only behave wisely
once they have exhausted
all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

#68. When Numa died, Rome by the twin disciplines of peace and war was as eminent for self-mastery as for military power.

Livy

#69. True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.

Barack Obama

#70. Political vitriol is a familiar enough characteristic of American history.

Robert Dallek

#71. Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Stanley Fish

#72. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.

Simon Schama

#73. 'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.

Natasha Trethewey

#74. In history as in life it is success that counts. Start a political upheaval and let yourself be caught, and you will hang as a traitor. But place yourself at the head of a rebellion and gain your point, and all future generations will worship you as the Father of their Country.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

#75. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

Abdourahman A. Waberi

#76. My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.

Roselee Goldberg

#77. All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

Moliere

#78. 'Rozabal' was theological while 'Chanakya' is political. Unlike 'Rozabal,' which was about research, the aim of 'Chanakya' is plot, plot, plot, which carries the character. The common DNA, of course, is history.

Ashwin Sanghi

#79. This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

Adolf Hitler

#80. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?

June Jordan

#81. We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.

T. F. Tout

#82. Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.

F. M. Powicke

#83. Never in the history of the world has there been a situation so bad that the government can't make it worse.

Henry Morgenthau Jr.

#84. The God of Exodus is the God of history and of political liberation more than he is the God of nature.

Gustavo Gutierrez

#85. History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.

Jason L. Riley

#86. In modern Greek history, there is a close relationship between national humiliation and political radicalization.

Christopher Hitchens

#87. In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.

A.J.P. Taylor

#88. We must not let history repeat itself in Iraq. The reality is there is no military solution in Iraq. This is a sectarian war with long standing roots that were flamed when we invaded Iraq in 2003. Any lasting solution must be political and take into account respect for the entire Iraqi population.

Barbara Lee

#89. I've said it before, history repeats itself for those who don't learn from the past. Can we please learn from all this? Please? Or is everyone waiting for yet another savior to come along and charm them Hollywood style if freedom is still around for America's next election?

L.M. Fields

#90. We can and we must build the political power to change the course of history - our survival depends on it.

Wenonah Hauter

#91. Throughout out history, when people have looked for new ways to solve their problems, and to uphold the principles of this nation, many times they have turned to political parties. They have often turned to the Democratic Party.

Barbara Jordan

#92. History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#93. Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.

Peter A. Lorge

#94. British Statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker, Edmund Burke once said, "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." This is true to say the least.

Robert Paulson

#95. With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Eric Metaxas

#96. From tea parties to the election in Massachusetts, we are witnessing the single greatest political pushback in American history.

Marco Rubio

#97. There are moments in history when men who are not necessarily fools or cowards behave as if they felt themselves conscientious executors named to administer some general heritage of cowardice and folly...

Edmond Taylor

#98. It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

#99. To cite the facts of history is to fall prey to 'moral equivalence,' or 'political correctness,' or 'the error of of atheism,' or one of the other misdeeds concocted to guard against the sins of understanding and insight into the real world.

Noam Chomsky

#100. We are fascinated with our own history, and we are fascinated with the Romans because they were millennia ago, and yet they still capture our imagination because they were actually so similar to us. They were very civilized. They had a very similar political system.

Kit Harington