Top 100 Quotes About Past History
#1. 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
#2. Environmental history ... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat ... The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances.
Roderick Nash
#3. Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.
George Lucas
#5. 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
#6. Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Thomas Mann
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.
Dean Koontz
#12. What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
#13. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past.
J. Frank Dobie
#15. history is our attempt to reconstruct the past from the evidence that remains
Philip Parker
#16. Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
Marilynne Robinson
#17. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
Penelope Lively
#18. 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
#19. History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.
M. King Hubbert
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.
Alexander Von Humboldt
#23. 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
#24. I have issues with anyone who tries to claim that science is unworkable - creationists who deny evidence for past history, yet are happy to benefit from the products of the methodology that they otherwise deny.
Liz Williams
#25. Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
#26. There is much to learn about what could happen in the gardens of the future, should designers wish to learn about the past.
Tom Turner
#27. Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't.
Arundhati Roy
#28. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
A.J.P. Taylor
#32. [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
#33. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.
Rafael Sabatini
#34. We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten ... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#36. 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
#37. At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
Clive Sinclair
#38. We have a history," I say, "that no one can take from us. No matter what happened in the past, no matter what happens from here, it can't take away from the good thing we had. You were my first love, Demi. You only get one.
Winter Renshaw
#39. History is really a study of the future, not the past.
Arundhati Roy
#40. It seems to me ... that I have always lived! I possess memories that go back to the Pharoahs. I see myself very clearly at different ages of history, practicing different professions ... My present personality is the result of my lost [past] personalities.
Gustave Flaubert
#41. Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
Eamon Duffy
#42. I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
#43. I saw the patterns of history and thought that a human might be eighty per cent chemicals, eighteen per cent his past, and two per cent feeling, creatures of habit. Which makes psychiatrists really pharmacists who have to listen longer.
Gerard Donovan
#44. Who was Vardan Mamikonian, and how did he come to play this most crucial role in Armenian history? It may justifiably be said that without his committed leadership, the term "Armenian" today might have referred to no more than an obscure, one-time, Christian people of long past.
Arra Avakian
#45. The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.
Jean Fritz
#46. In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Louise Bernikow
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
Edward Gibbon
#50. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.
Stephen Richards
#51. 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
#52. If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and e-mail records and Web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?
Chip Heath
#54. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis
Rabih Alameddine
#55. Of that time, there is still much we do not know.
Tom Bissell
#56. It takes great courage to break with one's past history and stand alone.
Marion Woodman
#57. For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.
Davis Bunn
#58. 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
#59. I don't need to know your history. I don't want to know about your past," he says as he looks at me. "I want to pretend that you exist today just for me, that no one else knows you the way I know you at this moment.
Ava Zavora
#60. The pathway traced with blood and tears,
and dust of all our father's dead,
Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,
Fade to the mist of nameless years.
("The Testimony of the Suns")
George Sterling
#61. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.
Barack Obama
#62. 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
#63. In America we have the greatest chance for opportunity than anyone else in the past six and a half thousand years. Never in recorded history have so many different gifts from all over the world been deposited in one country.
Jim Rohn
#64. Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.
Jonathan R. Miller
#65. Each age selects its own geniuses from the past to suit its own needs. It's always been that way.
Seb Kirby
#67. We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Sharon Salzberg
#68. There had been a time in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.
George MacDonald
#69. History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.
Aidan Chambers
#70. 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
#71. If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing)
Sting
#72. History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
John F. Kennedy
#73. The difference in the past and history is that the past is set in stone history is just an account from the guy with the strongest axe
Andy Andrews
#74. We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.
John McCain
#75. You gotta live in the moment. I don't care what you've done in your life, it has nothing to do with what you're gonna do or what you can do. The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift-that's why they call it the present.
Mike Ditka
#76. History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.
Ken Liu
#77. 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
#78. We have to forget the past. History is something that even today we are paying the consequences, and the future is integration. We all as a people, as citizens, as the leadership of both countries should be looking in that direction.
Atifete Jahjaga
#79. History, by apprising [the people] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future.
Thomas Jefferson
#80. 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
#81. The day history will die and lose its essence with time, memories will not only die, but they shall also surely be forgotten with time!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#82. Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race.
Mark Hopkins
#83. 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
#84. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form ... The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.
[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]
Jean-Henri Fabre
#85. The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
Jessamyn West
#86. In Italy, almost at every step, history and poetry add to the graces of nature, sweeten the memory of the past, and seem to preserve it in eternal youth.
Madame De Stael
#87. More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
#88. But the history of independent India has remained a field mostly untilled. If history is 'formally constituted knowledge of the past', then for the period since 1947 this knowledge practically does not exist.
Ramachandra Guha
#89. ...the past/that has a place for us will know us by our scattered wake."
A History Play,Waterborne
Linda Gregerson
#90. I never want to abandon my roots. I want to give my past and the history of painting the importance it deserves, including the masters like Rembrandt, who built up the surface of the canvas with transparent layers.
Jose Parla
#91. Of history, how little do we know by personal contact; we have lived a few years, seen a few men, witnessed some important events; but what are these in the whole sum of the world's past.
Matthew Simpson
#92. I like reading about the past. I'm definitely not a history buff, but I do read a bit of history now and again, and to do that for work is really exciting.
James McAvoy
#93. History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.
Colm Toibin
#94. In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
Sarah Vowell
#95. 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
#96. We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Umberto Eco
#97. 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
#98. Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up.
Anne Lamott
#99. Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.
Drew Gilpin Faust
#100. The present educational establishment, to cite just one group, has been obscuring the past so that our children have no way of comparing the facts of history with the distorted version promoted by biased secular historians.
Gary DeMar
