Top 100 Quotes About What Is History
#1. What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
Victor Hugo
#2. 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
#3. For what is history, but ... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.
Washington Irving
#4. Man, as man, has never realized himself. The greater part of him, his potential being, has always been submerged. What is history if not the endless story of his repeated failures?
Henry Miller
#5. What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?
Thomas Sowell
#6. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies..
Jon Krakauer
#7. What is history if not one endless assault on love?
Casper Silk
#8. What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.
Boris Pasternak
#9. What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.
Jean Cocteau
#10. History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Alan Bennett
#12. What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on ...
Voltaire
#14. 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
#15. Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Susan Sontag
#16. History has shown us time and again that what is right is not what is popular.
Benjamin Netanyahu
#17. ...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.
Mario Puzo
#18. An important part of what the state does is preserving its history.
James R. Thompson
#19. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#20. People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
Natasha Trethewey
#21. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#22. 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
#23. History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
Aristotle.
#24. Of course, one way of thinking about all of life and civilization is as being about how the world registers and processes information. Certainly that's what sex is about; that's what history is about.
Seth Lloyd
#25. The history of PR is ... a history of a battle for what is reality and how people will see and understand reality.
Stuart Ewen
#26. In A Brief History Of Time I used the word "God" like Einstein did as a shorthand for the laws of physics. However, this is not what most people mean by God, so I have decided not to use the term. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a God.
Stephen Hawking
#27. Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.
James Rollins
#28. To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.
George Orwell
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. This is the trouble with history. You can't see what's not there. You can look at an empty space and see that something's missing, but there's no way to know what it was.
Naomi Alderman
#34. 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
#35. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#37. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#38. This is a Disney animated feature; it's eternal, it's history. What's there to think about'
Tia Carrere
#39. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.
Joseph Bruchac
#40. I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I don't think the libertarians have it right when it comes to what the Constitution's all about. I don't think they have it right as to what our history is.
Rick Santorum
#41. [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
#42. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#43. 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
#44. Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.
George W. Bush
#45. History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma
Aldous Huxley
#46. This is a huge step toward unraveling Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 1-what happened in the beginning. This is a Genesis machine. It'll help to recreate the most glorious event in the history of the universe.
Michio Kaku
#47. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.
Steven Pinker
#48. With science and reason throughout history, what people believed turned out to be false. So I like to keep an open mind to all perspectives and learn and become more fully realised as a person. I just feel we're never going to know what the full picture is.
Conor Oberst
#49. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
James Russell Lowell
#50. 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
#51. This is what I would have done if I had to have a real job: I would have been a history teacher.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#52. Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the "intuitive linear" view of history rather than the "historical exponential" view.
Ray Kurzweil
#53. Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
A.S. Byatt
#54. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#55. 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
#56. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#57. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.
Kadir Nelson
#58. Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.
John Holt
#59. I have a unique history. There's no way to ever separate what your life would have been like if you had taken a different path. You have to embrace what is yours, and if you don't like it, you have to decide to change it.
Eve Plumb
#60. Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.
John Maynard Keynes
#61. Official history is merely a veil to hide the truth of what really happened. When the veil is lifted, again and again we see that not only is the official version not true, it is often 100% wrong.
David Icke
#62. Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.
Mike Jay
#63. History is not necessarily what happened but what is recorded.
Debbie Terranova
#64. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.
Jose Marti
#65. All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.
Ira Sachs
#66. Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.
Geoffrey Elton
#67. Now doctors access patient messages via a mobile or Web application, and the message automatically becomes part of a conversation. Under the new system, the whole care team is aware of what is happening, and the doctor has the patient's history available when fielding questions.
Anonymous
#68. One has to understand what the enemy is all about: the enemy's history, the enemy's culture, the enemy's aspirations. If you understand these well, you can perhaps move towards peace.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#69. I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.
Roland Joffe
#70. A lot of young players don't really know much about the history of the game and a lot of them are missing out on what the game is all about, especially the whole concept of sportsmanship and teamwork.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#71. 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
#72. History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.
Henry A. Kissinger
#73. It's a great wonder to me, the Irish attachment to our history. What is it but a series of lamentations?
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
#74. History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.
Stephen King
#75. 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
#76. Christine O'Donnell is making a mockery of running for public office. She has no real history, no real success in any kind of business. And what that sends to my generation is, one day, you can just wake up and run for Senate, no matter how [much] lack of experience you have.
Meghan McCain
#77. The subject matter is very tricky. It's about the Munich massacre and what Mossad did afterwards with the assassination squads. I think it's a turning point in history, especially for the Palestinians.
Daniel Craig
#78. My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.
Georges Cuvier
#79. 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
#80. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#81. History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
Elizabeth Bowen
#82. The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?
Bernhard Schlink
#83. What is commonly called literary history is actually a record of choices.
Louise Bernikow
#84. Psychotherapy is what God has been secretly doing for centuries by other names; that is, he searches through our personal history and heals what needs to be healed - the wounds of childhood or our own self-inflicted wounds.
Thomas Keating
#85. 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
#86. As far as the creative side of making great, great albums and really trying to go down in history? I don't see that happening lately, you know what I mean? You have a lot of guys is talented, but at the same time, timeless music is more important to me.
Raekwon
#87. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#88. What I have learned from studying counterfactual history is that the law of unintended consequences always kicks in no matter how secure you are in your plan. We have to live with the historical record as it is, like it or not.
Gavriel David Rosenfeld
#89. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#90. History is wonderful. We have so much we can learn if we would quit making ideology out of history, and just deal with what happened.
Nikki Giovanni
#91. History is the roadmap to a better tomorrow. Destroying it is getting rid of any chance of what not to do for future generations.
Jason E. Hodges
#92. War is an old, old plant on this earth, and a natural history of it would have to tell us under what soil conditions it grows, where it plays havoc, and how it is eliminated.
Ruth Benedict
#93. This is really what the White House is all about. It's the "People's House." It's a place that is steeped in history, but it's also a place where everyone should feel welcome. And that's why my husband and I have made it our mission to open up the house to as many people as we can.
Michelle Obama
#94. I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.
Jodie Foster
#95. Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#96. In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.
C. Wright Mills
#97. 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
#98. Hat the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we lived. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
Ellen Goodman
#100. 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
