Top 100 Public History Quotes
#1. The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.
John Quincy Adams
#2. What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
William S. Paley
#3. A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
Natasha Trethewey
#4. [In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
Rebecca Solnit
#5. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
Golda Meir
#6. Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#7. The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.
Constance Penley
#8. The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.
Irving R. Kaufman
#9. There's never been a time in history, no matter what the public thinks, when actors have been paid more than they should be.
Ed Asner
#10. The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
Paul Gauguin
#11. The supremacy of public opinion determines not only the singular role that economics occupies in the complex of thought and knowledge. It determines the whole process of human history.
Ludwig Von Mises
#12. The talent, including the talent for history - and I do think there are people who just have a talent for it, the way you have a talent for public speaking or music or whatever - it shouldn't be allowed to lie dormant. It should be brought alive.
David McCullough
#13. In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.
Wallace Stegner
#14. The history of our nation is intertwined with a certain religious tradition, and that the First Amendment was not intended to result in the complete exclusion of religious beliefs from our public classrooms.
William Bennett
#15. The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.
Noam Chomsky
#16. Somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.
C.V. Wedgwood
#17. The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Samuel Butler
#18. At one end of the continuum known as history are first-time events that have generated notable measures of public recognition due to either a positive or negative impact ...
Aberjhani
#19. I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history
Francis George
#20. Britain, the first industrial nation, had offered the world a remarkable public experiment in liberal, capitalist democracy whose success was premised upon free trade and world peace. Tuesday, 4 August 1914 brought that experiment to an abrupt halt.
Kenneth O. Morgan
#21. I think history has shown that the worst way to [try to] bring people over and actually change public opinion is by insult and applied degradation of them.
E. O. Wilson
#22. Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.
G. M. Trevelyan
#23. I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.
Jeremy Rifkin
#24. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as the ideological justification of the unconstrained power of what the large majority of individuals experience as a vast anonymous power, which, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.
Slavoj Zizek
#25. If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.
Moby
#26. History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.
Ludwig Von Mises
#27. Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.
Michael Bronski
#28. Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public
and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history.
Charles Krauthammer
#29. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.
Lawrence R. Klein
#30. I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world.
Tadao Ando
#31. Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Thomas Jefferson
#32. Well I have a drug history and a public drinking problem and I am not the healthiest guy. So they just ran that I died of a drug overdose.
Artie Lange
#33. EPA has a long history of relying on science that was not created by the agency itself. This often means that the science is not available to the public and, therefore, cannot be reproduced and verified.
John Barrasso
#34. We know little about history beyond its public displays, and even then what we know is reconstructed.
Mark Wallace
#35. Choosing education is a very good decision, not only good for the student, but also for our country. The United States was the first nation in history to recognize that public education for every citizen, regardless of class or station, was vital to its future ...
Mitt Romney
#37. Watergate was unique because it allowed the public to play its democratic role in expressing its outrage at the presidency. And as a result, for the first time in history a president resigned.
Samuel Dash
#38. The Clinton paradox: How could a president so intelligent, so compassionate, so public-spirited and so conscious of his place in history act in such a stupid, selfish and self-destructive manner?
George Stephanopoulos
#39. In Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride Frank X Walker helps restore to public memory one of history's greatest jockeys. Isaac Murphy's story has universal significance but it is very much a Kentucky story, of which all Kentuckians should be proud.
Gurney Norman
#40. Nowadays, with history not being taught anymore in American public schools, self-esteem is taking its place.
Dennis Miller
#41. Prophetic of infidel times, and indicating the unsoundness of our general education, 'The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation', has started into public favour with a fair chance of poisoning the fountains of science, and sapping the foundations of religion.
David Brewster
#42. I think, certainly, in history, if you look back, a lot of people would go through their careers, build a business, or be a doctor, lawyer, and then they would go and do public service later on in their careers.
Dana Perino
#43. Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.
Bettany Hughes
#44. Lynching is an important aspect of racial history and racial inequality in America, because it was visible, it was so public, it was so dramatic, and it was so violent.
Bryan Stevenson
#45. Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.
Lucas Mascotto-Carbone
#46. It isn't polls or public opinion at the moment that counts. It is right and wrong and leadership
men with fortitude, honesty, and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world.
Harry S. Truman
#47. Kids automatically teach each other how to use technology, but they're not going to teach each other about the history of democracy, or the importance of taking their voices into the public sphere to create social change.
Howard Rheingold
#48. Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.
John Coleman
#49. Downton Abbey is the most popular drama in the history of public television. When the whole of the TV universe is fragmenting, that isn't just impressive. It's almost impossible. But here we are.
David Bianculli
#50. The well of public opinion has been well and truly poisoned by the Iraq episode.
David Cameron
#51. It is a discreetly sensual act of disclosure, showing their pieces together in public. And assembling these lacquers also records their assignations: the collection records their love-affair, their own secret history of touch.
Edmund De Waal
#52. Do I regret taking the company public? Yes and no. Yes, because it put us under enormous pressure for a young company to go public at that point in its history, something you never could have done in the old days.
David Talbot
#53. Remember our proud history of social justice, universal health care, public pensions and making sure no one is left behind. Let's continue to move forward.
Jack Layton
#54. No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.
Johan Huizinga
#55. Throughout U.S. history, competent public investments have been an essential complement to private investments - from the Louisiana Purchase, to land-grant colleges, to the Interstate Highway System, to the Internet.
Felix Rohatyn
#56. If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity.
David Jaber
#57. There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.
Jeffrey Kluger
#58. We give Supreme Court justices this freedom because we expect them to remain above the pull of politics, to avoid the effects of public excitement and allow a broader view, not tied to the whims of the majority at a certain moment in history.
Herb Kohl
#59. There are few pages of history which do not demonstrate that public prayer and ritual never inoculated people against mass-madness and cruelty. What is needed is emphasis on morality and manners.
Steve Allen
#60. Saudis of all sorts recent having to beg princes for favors to secure services that should be a public right
Karen Elliott House
#61. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
Camille Paglia
#62. The concept of preserving history, collating full archives, making them as usable as possible so the public have access to them, I really feel that it allows the public an ability to engage with their own history.
Sarah Harrison
#63. The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.
Robert T. Bakker
#64. I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
Frank Gehry
#65. We have, for generations, been trying to be more inclusive of the word Southern. And a symbol like the confederate flag indicates white only are allowed into that world. And removing the Confederate flag from public view to the pages of history is long overdue.
William R. Ferris
#66. As an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history.
Christina Romer
#67. Christine O'Donnell is making a mockery of running for public office. She has no real history, no real success in any kind of business. And what that sends to my generation is, one day, you can just wake up and run for Senate, no matter how [much] lack of experience you have.
Meghan McCain
#68. You could argue that [the decline of public schools] is one of the major disasters in our lifetimes. We took one of the greatest successes in the history of the earth and turned it into one of the greatest disasters in the history of the earth.
Charlie Munger
#69. One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.
Alfred De Vigny
#70. The process of driving a wedge between sacred and secular history is called secularization...the eventual result of this process is that belief in God is relegated to nothing more than a "personal belief" that has no standing in public discourse.
Stephen Leston
#71. Our union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.
James Buchanan
#72. World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.
Jon Meacham
#73. Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.
Bethany McLean
#74. There's a long history of subsidized philanthropy - particularly in the USA - and again the public has come to expect corporations to play a role in their social welfare. It's become easy for some companies to profit from citizen goodwill and volunteerism.
Ravida Din
#75. 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
#76. Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history; and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.
James Buchan
#77. When Milly smiled it was a public event - when she didn't it was a chapter of history. They
Henry James
#78. How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along? While
Sarah Vowell
#79. I think cars encapsulate the history of innovation and style - it's the other side of the coin of the car being public enemy No.1.
Norman Foster
#80. History teaches us that there have been but few infringements of personal liberty by the state which have not been justified, as they are here, in the name of righteousness and the public good, and few which have not been directed, as they are now, at politically helpless minorities.
Harlan F. Stone
#81. It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.
Robert Adams
#83. American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?
Diane Ravitch
#84. No matter how good a public school teacher, he or she will always be required to teach the state's values and the state's perspective on subjects from sex to history and biology.
Cal Thomas
#85. I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
David McCullough
#86. And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn't mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.
Richard Serra
#87. Public opinion rarely considers the needs of the next generation or the history of the last. It is frequently hampered by myths and misinformation, by stereotypes and shibboleths, and by an inate resistance to innovation.
Theodore C. Sorensen
#88. Today the children of our public schools are taught more of the history, heroes, legends, and sagas of the old world than of the land of their birth, while they are furnished with little material on the people and institutions that are truly American.
Luther Standing Bear
#89. All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good.
Anita Roddick
#90. I bet I'm the only person in history who went from being the star of a sitcom to the host of a public-access show in less than a year.
Chris Gethard
#91. Boris Nemtsov, left his mark on the history of Russia, in politics and public life. He worked on important positions in the difficult transition period for our country. He always openly and honestly stated his position, defended his point of view.
Vladimir Putin
#92. All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted Nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.
Edmund Burke
#93. After eight months of one of the most intensive public and private investigations in American history, no one - no one - has come up with a shred of evidence that I had anything to do with the anthrax letters. I have never worked with anthrax. I know nothing about this matter.
Steven Hatfill
#94. In October 2014, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and raised $25 billion, marking it as the largest IPO in history. Alibaba is also one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world.
Jason Navallo
#95. I believe Britishness is defined not on ethnic and exclusive grounds but through shared values; our history of tolerance, openness and internationalism; and our commitment to democracy and liberty, to civic duty and the public space.
David Blunkett
#96. The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.
Mike Jay
#97. Limitation is not a matter of justice. It is a rule of public policy which has its origin in history and its justification in convenience.
Alfred Denning, Baron Denning
#98. Prophecy in this context may be understood as a redescription of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given in human utterance.
Walter Brueggemann
#99. And my mother always knew that, hence her Nikon raised high and pointed right into the mirror. She sensed that by documenting her own body, she was preserving her history. Beautifully. Nakedly. Imperfectly. Her private experiment made way for my public one.
Lena Dunham
#100. I'm truly worried about the country's direction. I can tell you this categorically, we've got the weakest president and the weakest governor in the history of my 50 years of public service.
Fritz Hollings
