Quotes About Us History

#1. 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

#2. But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I'm very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.

Tom Hanks

#3. In the next economic downturn there will be an outbreak of bitterness and contempt for the supercorporate chieftains who pay themselves millions. In every major economic downturn in US history the villains have been the heroes during the preceding boom.

Peter Drucker

#4. The reason history is fascinating is because people in other times and places are so like us. The reason history is difficult is because people in other times and places are so different from us. History is, to that extent, like marriage,

N. T. Wright

#5. Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

#6. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

#7. History teaches us that nobody can prevent a resistance group from arming when it has the support of the people.

Bashar Al-Assad

#8. Conquest by force is not sanctioned by God. The Americans have no right to be here. We will defeat them because we believe that this land they usurp is ours; God created it for us. The whole history of mankind has shown how faith endures while steel rusts.
-Istak

F. Sionil Jose

#9. The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#10. It Begins with skepticism. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible.

Steven Pinker

#11. History has shown us time and again that what is right is not what is popular.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#12. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...

Miriam Makeba

#13. History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

Timothy Snyder

#14. Kip Keino, Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, they all come from my tribe. Some say it is the food we eat that makes us strong, the way we live. In the history of our people we wear no clothes and we are used to drinking the blood of animals.

Martin Lel

#15. Few people can claim they are born into the right period of history. Most of us have to make do with the times we find ourselves in.

Sally Gardner

#16. The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe ...

William Lane Craig

#17. Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling
in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.

Will Durant

#18. You wanted to show us ... a battle droid? The most incompetent droid soldier in the history of both the Republic and the Empire. A mechanical comedy of errors.

Chuck Wendig

#19. The big reason that 'Doctor Who' is still with us is that every single viewer who ever turned in to watch this show, at any age, at any time in its history, took it into their heart - because 'Doctor Who' belongs to all of us. Everyone made 'Doctor Who.'

Peter Capaldi

#20. A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. - Froude's History of England, ch. i.

William Hurrell Mallock

#21. My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness. We must do what we know is right, and do it with all our might. Let history say of us: "These were golden years - when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, and America reached for her best."

Ronald Reagan

#22. No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.

Malcolm X

#23. It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.

Terence McKenna

#24. 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

#25. There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.

Jonathan Trigell

#26. History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

Gordon S. Wood

#27. The lessons of history teach us - if the lessons of history teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

Robert A. Heinlein

#28. Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.

Buchi Emecheta

#29. I want each and every West Virginian to have bragging rights. I want to stop playing defense and start playing offense. So, together, let us grab the reins of history.

Joe Manchin

#30. Neighbours watching neighbours, twisting ropes to bind us all.

Jessie Burton

#31. We're all going to die. Most of us will leave no mark of our existence behind what-so-ever. Not a stain or a smudge or a smear on the face of history. I think that's sad." It made Romney horribly regretful to think that the fat man was right.

Oliver Tidy

#32. We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

Steven C. Rockefeller

#33. After all, when the world looks to America, they look to us because we are the most successful political and economic experiment in human history.

Condoleezza Rice

#34. There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.

Mark Twain

#35. I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.

David Christian

#36. 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

#37. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#38. In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point
out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is
not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate
them.

Pierre Trudeau

#39. [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

#40. The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.

A.E. Samaan

#41. Let us remember that the times which future generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but those of adversity bravely borne.

Charles William Eliot

#42. I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.

Twyla Tharp

#43. Wealth is not a given or an accident of history. It is not bestowed on us like rain from above. It is the product of human creativity in an environment of freedom. The freedom to own, to make contracts, to save, to invest, to associate, and to trade: these are the key to prosperity.

Llewellyn Rockwell

#44. Just because you are innocent does not mean that others cannot harm you. History teaches us that lesson.

Frederick Lenz

#45. This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Nick Joaquin

#46. 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

#47. Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.

Pearl Cleage

#48. God in His providence hasn't called us to watch history, but to shape history by praying in His Name.

David Platt

#49. Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people ... We are a nation rich in rivers.

Charles Kuralt

#50. Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines.

Peter Coyote

#51. But all history has taught us the grim lesson that no nation has ever been successful in avoiding the terrors of war by refusing to defend its rights - by attempting to placate aggression.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#52. The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.

Geza Vermes

#53. 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

#54. Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

Sloane Crosley

#55. History flung the accents on our names into the water when it took us across the Gulf of Siam thirty years ago.

Kim Thuy

#56. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.

Umberto Eco

#57. I care about Roger Sterling, one of the most subtle and amazing characters in dramatic history [Mad men]. This guys who knows precisely who he is, yet leaves us time after time hoping desperately for him to finally grab control of his life and some responsibility for those around him.

Chris Matthews

#58. Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods - like airports and highways - has a long, often-uncontroversial history.

Bethany McLean

#59. 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

#60. Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.

Manmohan Singh

#61. History is full of people who thought they were right
absolutely right, completely right, without a shadow of a doubt. And because history never seems like history when you are living through it, it is tempting for us to think the same.

John D. Barrow

#62. I think Donald Trump's history has shown that this was a very problematic thing. There were so many ways Iraq could have gone awry once we started, and I don't think most of us spend enough time considering the dangers.

Jeff Sessions

#63. We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.

Charlie Pierce

#64. It was always so important to my dad for us to understand about the Genocide and to know about our family history.

Kim Kardashian

#65. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.

Matthew Pearl

#66. As a child, I thought that war and peace were opposites. Yet I lived in peace when Vietnam was in flames and I didn't experience war until Vietnam had laid down its weapons. I believe that war and peace are actually friends, who mock us.

Kim Thuy

#67. Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day -

Emily Dickinson

#68. This is the biggest cemetery for Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti. It must tell us that we have to come back here again and again. We must keep the memory of the worst crime in human history alive for those who were born later.

Horst Kohler

#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. So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

Max Tegmark

#71. Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called 'progressives' should be thanking him for it - even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.

John Podhoretz

#72. 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

#73. The down-and-out, who flocked to Jesus when he lived on earth, no longer feel welcome. How did Jesus, the only perfect person in history, manage to attract the notoriously imperfect? And what keeps us from following in his steps today?

Philip Yancey

#74. In the history of humanity, women have never been as oppressed as they are right now. Men can make babies with us and then walk away.

Laura Schlessinger

#75. If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.

Madeleine L'Engle

#76. Sometimes things can take a very long time and still not be very good. It took us all of evolutionary history just to get where we are today, for instance, and mostly where we are today is on the couch.

Gina Barreca

#77. Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.

Mike Jay

#78. The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between.

David Lloyd-Jones

#79. The hiring of Phil Messina, the production designer, was a big decision. He's so gifted, and his ideas were always so smart and rooted in American history and architecture. Nothing feels like it's not us, or couldn't be us, and I think that's very important.

Nina Jacobson

#80. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

Leon Trotsky

#81. History should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.

Margaret MacMillan

#82. The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

Megan Smolenyak

#83. I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.

Romain Gary

#84. History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares.

Sarah Churchwell

#85. 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

#86. Before the tears that tore us, when our history was before us.

Lang Leav

#87. Our own story is even more important for us to know than history.

Kristin Cashore

#88. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver. (Deborah Levy, Hot Milk, p. 185)

Deborah Levy

#89. Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

Haruki Murakami

#90. I believe history teaches us a categorical lesson: that once a people are determined to become free, then nothing in the world can stop them reaching their goal.

Desmond Tutu

#91. We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.

Kurt Vonnegut

#92. In the ultimate analysis, all of us would have served Pakistan better if history and our future generations judge us positively.

Ashfaq Parvez Kayani

#93. Teens affect history. They affect lives; they affect our cultural growth and change, and yet, and at the same time, they are often the most vulnerable among us.

Mary E. Pearson

#94. I really feel sorry for kids who aren't interested in history - recent history, either, because it is this that made us what we are.

Barry Humphries

#95. Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

Louis Kronenberger

#96. If history only remembers one in a thousand of us, then that future will be filled with stories of who we were and what we did.

Electronic Arts

#97. Black folk, a lot of us lived as victims in a certain part of our history. And we had to really erase that tape. We're not victims. We are citizens.

Dorothy Cotton

#98. 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

#99. What are we do to? The child sex trade is not for us: our children are unattractive and rude, and - due to the knowledge of our history - have a bad habit of mugging prospective customers and shoving them over cliffs.

Margaret Atwood

#100. Let us be patient with one another,
And even patient with ourselves.
We have a long, long way to go.
So let us hasten along the road,
The road of human tenderness and generosity.
Groping, we may find one another's hands in the dark.

Emily Greene Balch