Top 100 Quotes About The Past And History
#1. 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
#2. The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.
John Dominic Crossan
#3. When there's a history between people, it makes for some serious complications - even in something seemingly as simple as friendship. There is no real starting over. There's only trying to minimize the importance of things in the past. And some events are just too life altering to trivialize.
Megan Thomason
#4. 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
#5. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And
Anne Applebaum
#6. I suppose being the kind of creatures we [people] are, we like to censor the past, and are selective, or want to be selective about the things that we remember. If you want to destroy people, destroy their memory, destroy their history.
Desmond Tutu
#7. 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
#8. When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.
Martin Luther
#9. History is a light that illuminates the past,
and a key that unlocks the door to the future.
Runoko Rashidi
#10. Jews must learn to say without excuse, without equivocation: despite our history and our powerlessness in the past, despite allthe injustices that we have endured
today, now, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and their oppressors are the Israelis.
Irena Klepfisz
#11. The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.
Leon Redbone
#12. 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
#13. I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of
a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of
the history of the world of the past.
Theodore Roosevelt
#14. Motherless mothers with a history of caretaking experience, usually for sick mothers or younger siblings when they were still children themselves, said that the round-the-clock nature of infant and toddler care sometimes brought up familiar emotions from the past.
Hope Edelman
#15. Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
George Eliot
#16. What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from.
Wallace Stegner
#17. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
Edmund Morgan
#18. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns. [...] All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.
Paul Kingsnorth
#19. The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.
Dalai Lama
#20. Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
#21. "History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.
G. M. Trevelyan
#22. In life you have to rely on the past, and that's called history.
Donald Trump
#23. 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
#24. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere." "Which is why you can't go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening," said Enoch. "History heals itself. Isn't that interesting?
Ransom Riggs
#25. It is not a first time in history that we have got people who have sold out and subverted the ideas for which they stood for in the past.
Auliq Ice
#26. Once again a new world view is arising ... This idea is the culmination of all human history. It holds the promise of fulfilling the great aspirations of the past and heralds the advent of the next phase of our evolution. It is the idea of conscious evolution.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
#27. If the future remains uncertain, we know the past history of nationalism. And that should be sufficient to encourage a habit of watchful suspicion.
Michael Billig
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
Freya Stark
#31. The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
John Ruskin
#32. You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth ... Your every past action and thought have made you what you are.
Charles R. Johnson
#33. Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.
Amit Chaudhuri
#34. I'm a bad man. I need to understand the past. It illuminates the present.
Glen Cook
#35. He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his,
Jhumpa Lahiri
#36. We have a harder way to succeed in life as Serbs because of the past that we had and because of the history we had.
Novak Djokovic
#37. I love the Warner Brothers lot. There is so much history there. They've done such a smart thing. They have signs outside of each stage which tell you what movies and TV shows were shot inside. So cool ... you can almost feel the ghosts of actors past.
Valerie Azlynn
#38. Without a good understanding of history how can we make informed and therefore good and sensible decisions about current issues? The future then can only be made better by knowledge of the past.
Keith Tonkin
#39. History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.
Timothy George
#40. It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
Hannah Arendt
#41. Past a certain point, all the dates grow hazy and confused, and the clarity of history becomes the fog of legend.
George R R Martin
#42. Old cookbooks connect you to your past and explain the history of the world.
Jose Andres
#43. 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
#44. The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.
Stephanie Coontz
#45. To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole one must ignore or suppress man as he really is. It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future, and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.
Eric Hoffer
#46. The point of history, the very essence of it as a field of study, is to find correspondences. You look at the past so that you can understand it, and through it you come to a better understanding of your own time. If you're lucky, sometimes you can even extrapolate to possible futures." "I'm not
M.R. Carey
#47. But I could not sleep without proper covering and spent the rest of the night rewriting lost arguments from my past, altering history so that I emerged victorious.
Patrick DeWitt
#48. 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
#49. History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the and and lead us into that world.
Judith Geary
#50. We all inherit damage from the past. We spread it like a virus and don't generally think about it.
Thomas Norman DeWolf
#51. History narrates stories about great men from the past,write your story now and make history
Mohammed Sekouty
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Louise Bernikow
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. [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
#65. 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
#66. The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
John F. Kennedy
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion.
Penelope Lively
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#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. 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
#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 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
#79. Who owns history? Everyone and no one
which is why the study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.
Eric Foner
#80. A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
Grandma Moses
#81. We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.
Daisaku Ikeda
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
Robert Penn Warren
#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. 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
#88. 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
#89. Ignorance and its denial will, sad to say, lead us down the same road as it did in all past history.
Jordan Maxwell
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.
Sharon Salzberg
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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