Top 100 Quotes About History And Present
#1. If we wish to foresee the future of mathematics, our proper course is to study the history and present condition of the science.
Henri Poincare
#2. But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon
#3. You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
Hermann Hesse
#4. An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began.
Robin Morgan
#6. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#7. History is the archaeology of the present and future.
Patrick Mendis
#8. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register.
Hans F. Sennholz
#9. Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.
Larry McMurtry
#10. Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Philip Zaleski
#11. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.
Howard Zinn
#12. The lessons of past is critical for teachings in present. And experience in the future.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#13. The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.
John Greenleaf Whittier
#14. (A) trip to the attic is an excursion into history, and ... all over the world the present unravels beneath the stored detritus of the past; that's what attics are for.
Valerie Martin
#16. I have thoroughly gone through the subject of the Incarnation; and if it served you, could at any time give you the history from the beginning of the controversies on this subject, and of its present form.
Edward Irving
#17. There are these moments in the military where you're present at these enormous intersections of history and humanity. I came out of the end of that, and I just wanted to write. If you do it well, you know it will last. It can't get blown away like everything else.
Elliot Ackerman
#18. Two men with a camera, thoughtfully observing the visual cacophony of one major thoroughfare and the complicated interplay of its history, its present, and the certainty of change, have laid the groundwork for a dialogue and a vision that reaches farther than human eyes can see.
Vicki Goldberg
#19. For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.
Hubert H. Humphrey
#21. Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.
Aurin Squire
#22. You don't rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.
V.T. Davy
#23. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.
Zadie Smith
#24. [T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.
Fritz Stern
#25. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.
Pearl S. Buck
#26. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
John Berger
#27. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#28. For me, adventures are a vehicle for travelling deep into the fabric of society, coming to know the environmental conditions that shape people's lives and viewing the present in the context of history.
Tim Cope
#29. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
Damon Galgut
#30. And the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history ...
James Joyce
#31. To THOSE who want to lift this nation from the dungheap of history, the past does not matter - only the present, the awareness of the deadening rot which surrounds and suffocates us, and what we must do to vanquish it.
F. Sionil Jose
#32. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
#33. I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.
Claire Tomalin
#34. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
Cormac McCarthy
#35. No, I don't have the slightest desire to rewrite the past or history or whatever. What I'd like to rewrite is the present, here and now.
Haruki Murakami
#36. Today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
Bil Keane
#37. The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
Lord Acton
#38. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe's history and not Europe's present.
Gordon Brown
#39. In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#40. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.
Yuval Noah Harari
#41. For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.
R. Scott Bakker
#42. There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.
John Robinson
#43. In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.
Anthony Doerr
#44. The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
Edward Hallett Carr
#45. If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
Russell Hoban
#46. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
#47. History repeating itself, he thought. Lessons learned long ago so often needed to be learned all over again in the present. It might true here, and he might be the student who was being taught.
Terry Brooks
#48. It is a natural human instinct to turn our fears into symbols, and destroy the symbols, in the hope that it will destroy the fear. It is a logic that keeps recurring throughout human history, from the Crusades to the witch hunts to the present day.
Johann Hari
#49. We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.
Regis Debray
#50. The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society.
Michael Crichton
#51. Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#52. 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
#53. First, I look at history the way I look at evolution. Some things die out for a good reason, and should be left dead. I put dictatorships and velociraptors in the same category: leave them in the past, where they can serve as frightening object lessons for the present.
Holly Lisle
#54. It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.
Christopher Kelly
#55. That's what I want for my life. I want to go to Peshawar ... Because there's more past than present there. Two and a half thousand years of history beneath its soil. How long a list of reasons do you need?
Kamila Shamsie
#56. The present is an age of talkers, and not doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are so far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements.
William Hazlitt
#57. It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#58. Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective.
Mohsin Hamid
#59. Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.
Jim Rohn
#60. History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.
John H. Arnold
#61. We CREATORS are builders. We are dedicated to the idea of building a beautiful world so different and so superior to the present one that we CREATORS of this generation will go down in history as the revolutionaries who ushered in the Golden Age of Mankind.
Ben Klassen
#62. 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
#63. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
Franz Boas
#64. 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
#65. Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and imagine nothing so barbarous or savage but what is contrary to the manners of their own time.
Anthony Ashley Cooper III
#66. [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
#67. 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
#68. History is about the untold story, and writing historical fiction is a wonderful way to present the past in a compelling and entertaining way.
Paul W. Feenstra
#69. My happiness is being able to present my talents for people to see, and I feel like I'm an ambassador of Thai history and Thai culture on film so that people can see Muay Thai.
Tony Jaa
#70. 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
#71. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#72. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today.
Henry Ford
#73. History is the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instructor of the present, and monitor to the future.
Miguel De Cervantes
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert Kennedy
#77. The eternal struggle in the law between constancy and change is largely a struggle between history and reason, between past reason and present needs.
Felix Frankfurter
#78. Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past
Tom McCarthy
#79. It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.
David Wiseman
#80. She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#81. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.
Paula Gunn Allen
#82. I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.
Glen Cook
#83. It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.
Carl Jung
#84. How it came to pass that man, originally taught, as we doubt not he was, to know and to worship the true Jehovah, is found, at so early a period of his history, a worshiper of baser objects, it is foreign to our present purpose to inquire.
Simon Greenleaf
#85. Each soil has had its own history. Like a river, a mountain, a forest, or any natural thing, its present condition is due to the influences of many things and events of the past.
Charles Kellogg
#86. Leave No Trace (bad language)
Sometimes she will speak of him as present, sometimes as past, and sometimes as always. That is how it should be. No one needs rescuing from her own story of the truth and no one needs to side step her history. p270
Hannah Nyala
#87. As long as the same passions and interests subsist among mankind, the questions of war and peace, of justice and policy, which were debated in the councils of antiquity, will frequently present themselves as the subject of modern deliberation.
Edward Gibbon
#88. The day before yesterday always has been a glamour day. The present is sordid and prosaic. Time colors history as it does a meerschaum pipe.
Vincent Starrett
#89. The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#90. There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
Edward Gibbon
#91. In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.
Roger D. Woodard
#92. YESTERDAY IS HISTORY. TOMORROW IS A MYSTERY. TODAY IS A GIFT. THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED THE PRESENT. WORK HARD, BE HAPPY, AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE IN WAYWARD PINES!
Blake Crouch
#93. It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between
the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some
fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.
Norman Davies
#94. So it seems like all of history is concurrent. Its not a linear series of events. Its all happening simultaneously. There is one moment, and that moment is now, and we are always present in it.So Im not reenacting history so much as just living every time at once.
Leila Sales
#95. I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.
Garth Greenwell
#96. All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
#97. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.
Eric Metaxas
#98. What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different ... the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah
N. T. Wright
#99. What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.
Chris Marker
#100. Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.
Terence McKenna
