Top 100 Quotes About History Books
#1. If you think you have it tough, read history books.
Bill Maher
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I didn't need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. i already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.
Kurt Vonnegut
#5. James II's second wife, an Italian Catholic princess called Mary (at the time, there was an edict whereby all female royals were to be called Mary to confuse future readers of history books),
Stephen Clarke
#6. With the publication of this book we, as non-Jews, are doing our small part to stand up for the truth. So let us state unequivocally here and now: the Holocaust happened EXACTLY as per the history books. Period. Fact. No debate whatsoever.
James Morcan
#7. We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
Dick Gregory
#8. We do what we must to earn our place in the community, but we live for the hours at home. For each other, for the children. It will never get me written up in the history books.
Orson Scott Card
#9. Politicians against gay marriage now, are the future villains of our American History books.
Natalie Maines
#10. When real substantive change happens it's the people who watch your show, they're the ones that make it happen. It's people whose names are not highlighted in history books. They're the ones that stand up in their place and time to make change.
Tom Morello
#11. History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Anatole France
#12. Lilia did not believe in miracles outside of history books, but she was beginning to believe in her own power, and that was a more frightening thing to believe in.
Kameron Hurley
#13. 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
#14. History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?
Dan Brown
#15. As you grow older and young people come up to you with their history books, you realize that some of the things I have been able to do have been impactful. But for me, I try to keep everything in perspective and stay humble.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
#16. The most important events in every age never reach the history books.
C.S. Lewis
#17. I find that the history books that we teach our kids with are not fully truthful, in my opinion.
Jesse Ventura
#18. It's in the history books, the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
Gene Simmons
#19. History books are being re-written all the time
Andy Warhol
#20. People come from all over the world to see this little place they've seen in movies and read about in history books: Soho.
Marc Almond
#21. History books are filled with lies. Whoever wins the war tells the story.
Stephanie Perkins
#22. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier
#23. I knew always that Holland gave away the most Jews of all the countries. We are not the heroes that are in the history books.
Carice Van Houten
#24. Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.
Margaret Thatcher
#25. Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart.
George Michael
#26. Isn't a normal night. It's the kind of evening remembered in history books. You know history, which only winners write, and forge it the way they like?
Cameron Jace
#27. When I was in school, all our history books were American, so we learned American history, not Canadian history.
Dave Foley
#28. What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'
Martin Chalfie
#29. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.
Sally Mann
#30. 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
#31. Each Inspirational Messenger who was and has been acknowledged in the history books was done so because of the way they chose to live. Their life had a core message that was central to their years, whether they exemplified and expressed whenever they took a step in the world.
Emily Gowor
#32. This is where you and I are headed ... Look for us in history books and you'll find us in the margins. Look for us in legends and you might just find us celebrated
Scott Lynch
#33. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.
Lester Bangs
#34. I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#35. We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#36. I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
Isabel Allende
#37. But the participants [in war] never forgot the details of their experience, and like the Wandering Jew, they were condemned to remain their own history books, each containing a story they could not pass on to others and from which no one would learn anything of value.
James Lee Burke
#38. My process for determining which eras I'd write about was to just read history books that gave a really broad overview of Chinese history. And when I came across a historical figure or a historical incident that was especially interesting to me, ideas for characters and stories would surface.
Susan Barker
#39. And the history books forgot about us, and the bible didn't mention us
Regina Spektor
#41. Many people read History books but it takes just a few people to LEAD the cause that will shape the course of HISTORY.
Fela Durotoye
#42. My morning rambles through the park will never make the history books.
Marty Rubin
#43. Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.
Joanne Harris
#44. From history books you should at best believe just the punctuation. The rest is uncertain, incomplete, distorted, exaggerated or even fabricated.
A.J. Beirens
#45. Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he's already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn't been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.
Alasdair Gray
#46. My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Ellen Tauscher
#48. But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.
Ron Rash
#49. It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
Bill Vaughan
#50. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington - wasn't nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington.
Malcolm X
#51. I started looking into horse history books and came across the actual story of this half-breed endurance horseman and his painted mustang Hidalgo. I wasn't really sure if I was going to do the movie at that point.
John Fusco
#52. Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.
David Letterman
#53. All my life, I never believed most things I read in history books and a lot of things I learned in school. But now I've found I don't have the right to make a judgment on someone based on something I've read. I don't have the right to judge anything. That's the lesson I've learned
Kurt Cobain
#54. I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
Richard Rorty
#55. Winning and making history is something you can't buy. Me? I'm a guy who loves history. When I'm 60 or 70, I don't want to be remembered for the money I make. I want to be in the history books.
LaMarr Woodley
#56. I suppose, as a politician, I should be content, for the Canada Pension Plan certainly put my name in Canada's history books, and in italics.
Judy LaMarsh
#57. As long as there are history books, Neil Armstrong will be included in them, remembered for taking humankind's first small step on a world beyond our own.
Charles Bolden
#58. If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#59. I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.
Virginia Henley
#60. Be lord of a day, through wisdom and justice, and you can put up your history books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#61. A legacy is not what is recorded in history books or repeated in song, but what is woven into the souls of those who remain.
(from The General's Legacy)
Adrian G. Hilder
#62. It would be written in the history books," Luci Baines Johnson said. "But now the history had to be made.
Ari Berman
#63. When the history books are written in a thousand years, when space travel would have become routine, the moment that humans first left Earth will be of huge importance. Star City is a central part of this story and it deserves more recognition.
Helen Sharman
#64. The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.
David Gross
#65. Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.
Thomas Carlyle
#66. Humans, on the whole, Feo could take or leave; there was only one person she loved properly, with the sort of fierce pride that gets people into trouble, or prison, or history books.
Katherine Rundell
#67. These secrets came down my own ornately curved and twisting family line. For family stories are never as direct as history books, and therefore they are more true.
Liz Rosenberg
#68. The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy.
Helen Thomas
#69. Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books.
David Strathairn
#70. It's not in the history books because if people knew the truth they wouldn't be able to go about their day to day lives, they would just be too freaked out, and what is left of society would crumble.
M.D. Bowden
#71. If I don't tell it all now, the story in the history books will always be imperfect and that would be wrong.
Christine Keeler
#72. When I was a little boy in Worcestershire reading history books I never thought I should have to interfere between a king and his mistress.
Stanley Baldwin
#73. The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious
Anatole France
#74. On this International Day for the Abolition of Slavery let us reaffirm the inherent dignity of all men, women and children. And let us redouble our efforts to build societies in which slavery truly is a term for the history books.
Ban Ki-moon
#75. I just wanted to be the first one to fly for America, not because I'd end up in the pages of history books.
Alan Shepard
#76. I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.
Virginia Henley
#77. In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
Colum McCann
#78. Solyndra will be remembered in the history books as a sad hallmark of a newly installed administration that felt it was above the rules, lusting for positive headlines rather than focused on delivering results.
Fred Upton
#79. When it comes time to default, they're not going to remember any of the Republicans' names. They are going to remember in history books one name, and that's Obama.
Donald Trump
#81. If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.
Cesare Beccaria
#82. I know that I'm already in the history books and that people are going to remember me as the prisoner of war and the fabricated stories, but you know, to me I was just another soldier over there doing my job.
Jessica Lynch
#83. It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds.
Terry Pratchett
#84. In my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books.
Lisa Factora-Borchers
#85. History books celebrate people who overcome great challenges, they do not celebrate critics.
Ryan Chamberlin
#86. Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war.
Kamal Haasan
#87. There are moments in time that can never be understood, at least not fully. Times we only read about in history books, or see in movies, barely a re-creation of the truth. But it takes more than reading about it or putting on the costumes to understand what history really means.
Leslie Tall Manning
#88. History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win.
Harold S. Kushner
#89. Every word I say, you can document it and put it in the history books.
Riff Raff
#90. I want you to write yourself into history because no matter what history books say, even you are a part of it.
Nnedi Okorafor
#91. History books are a record of events which bring us to the world in which we live today.
Ian Davies
#92. I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.
James McBride
#93. You read about me in history books, but now I am dedicated to spreading the truth about preserving the dignity of all human life from natural conception to natural death.
Norma McCorvey
#94. On the announcement that signs of extra terrestrial life were found in a meteorite, August 6, 1996 A hundred years from now Bob Dole's new tax plan will rate a footnote in the history books and this may have a whole chapter in itself.
Richard E. Berendzen
#95. Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.
Catherynne M Valente
#96. I always tell people that if they want to know about the history of a country, do not go to the history books, go to the fiction. Fiction is not fiction. It is the substance and heartbeat of a people's life, here, now, and in the past.
Chenjerai Hove
#97. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.
George Orwell
#98. Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, 'Those who can, do, those who can't, teach,' forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.
Michael Ignatieff
#99. I read daft history books. Sometimes the books I read are a bit crackers or strange.
Mark E. Smith
#100. Where once his grandparents put up crucifixes and images of the benediction on their walls, he and Reine-Marie put up books on theirs. History books. Reference books. Biographies. Fiction, nonfiction. Stories lined the walls and both insulated them from the outside world and connected them to it.
Louise Penny
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