Top 100 Reading History Quotes
#1. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99
Roger Lowenstein
#2. 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
#3. I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder.
Matt Taibbi
#4. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#5. I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.
Will Hobbs
#6. Read. Read every chance you get. Read to keep growing. Read history. Read poetry. Read for pure enjoyment. Read a book called Life on a Little Known Planet. It's about insects. It will make you feel better.
David McCullough
#7. I love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.
Shakira
#8. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#9. Sometimes I imagine a surveyor 100 years from now reading my plan, retracing my boundaries, and finding the monuments that I set. It's an honor to make a mark in history like that.
Mark Mason
#11. When you juice books from a library you are taking the history and imagination that has accumulated over so many years there.
S.A. Tawks
#12. One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires - and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.
Thomas Sowell
#13. When I'm reading for my own pleasure, I read things other than history or archival material. I read a lot of fiction. I'm very fond of mysteries.
David McCullough
#14. Just like I am obsessed with the history of fashion, I love reading about the history of makeup.
Cyndi Lauper
#15. I think school is so important. I was good student. A rebel, but I did well in my studies. I don't close myself to anything. I liked reading and I still love learning. I loved history and German.
Bruno Tonioli
#16. 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
#17. The labels on the little bottles and boxes do not tell you which one is the sleeping pill. Instead they have names, long strange names that slide out of shape while you are reading them. They sound like kings from history or alien planets. There are hundreds of them.
Paul Murray
#18. Learning from books is so empowering - whether it be from history, a novel or a poem. When you come away from reading having learned something, you yourself are bigger.
Lisa Lucas
#19. As a child, I read science fiction, but from the very beginnings of my reading for pleasure, I read a lot of non-fictional history, particularly historical biography.
Norman Spinrad
#20. Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
Louis L'Amour
#21. When you go visiting countries, you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture, and then you have to leave. In my experience, all countries have hidden treasures.
Jo Nesbo
#22. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#23. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Louis L'Amour
#24. My daughter will be reading about Pat Buchanan in a history book someday, and I am hanging out fist-bumping with him and joking with him.
Willie Geist
#26. I've been a lifelong horror fan, but at the same time, I would say 90 percent of my reading is biographies and nonfiction history.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#27. 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
#28. Myths are not to be despised, but reading them literally is not to be recommended.
Peter Burke
#29. There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.
Will Rogers
#30. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
#31. I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.
Hailee Steinfeld
#32. Of course we all know people who aren't cut out for college, but I know it's a mistake to think of education only as a route to a better career. Reading books, studying history - all these things contribute to making us better citizens, too.
Rebecca Mead
#33. I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.'
(from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor, July 26, 1993)
Peter F. Drucker
#34. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.
Patricia Polacco
#35. Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#36. Cousin-screwing. It is not totally safe. It raises the risk of birth defects slightly. But I was reading in a book for history that there's, like, a 99.9999 percent chance that at least one of your great-great-great-grandparents married first cousin.
John Green
#37. the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness
Mark Epstein
#38. The history of food has never had a better biographer. Required reading for anyone who eats.
Dan Barber
#39. 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
#40. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#41. People are reading. In fact, due to social media they are reading more than any time in history. Now we must find a way to get them to include books in all that reading. It starts with us writers doing a better job of writing.
Will Gibson
#42. Stella Suberman's Suggestions for Further Reading
The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, by Edward Cohen
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, by Eli N. Evans
Insecure Prosperity, by Ewa Morawska
The Slow Way Back, by Judy Goldman
Stella Suberman
#43. In my pursuit of historical ecology, I find the pleasure of reading history.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#44. Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.
Brad Meltzer
#45. The Airwitch had gone from reading nothing in his life to never stopping, buying every novel or history book he could get his hands on.
Susan Dennard
#46. I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
Natasha Trethewey
#48. Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.
Matthew Stewart
#49. You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living.
Ken Burns
#50. Education was the most important value in our home when I was growing up. People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.
Caroline Kennedy
#51. Reading gives us the furniture of our minds. Reading can spell the difference between independence and slavery; liberation and isolation. Without reading, our history would have turned out differently. Reading made and shaped our heroes. Reading liberates.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#52. I grew up reading the classic novels of Cold War espionage, and I studied Russian history and Soviet foreign policy.
Daniel Silva
#53. Reading history, one rarely gets the feeling of the true nature of scientific development, in which the element of farce is as great as the element of triumph.
David Gross
#54. I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.
Sara Sheridan
#55. Reading reassures us that no matter how alone we might feel, there are many others - spread as wide as history itself - who have felt the same way we have, who have occupied the rooms we find ourselves locked in at various points of our lives.
Simon Van Booy
#56. I'm sick and tired of (only) reading about church history; let's make (some) by the grace of God
Leonard Ravenhill
#57. We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
Henry David Thoreau
#58. Travel now by all means - if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.
Oliver Sacks
#59. My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.
F. Sionil Jose
#60. Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi
#61. We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
Richard Marius
#62. We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
William Hazlitt
#63. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
Claire Messud
#64. But really, for me, I tried to find first-person accounts. I tried to read stories from men and women who had survived slavery because it's different when you hear it from their mouths instead of reading it from a history book.
Jurnee Smollett
#65. It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.
Dustin Lance Black
#66. Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.
Novalis
#67. The history of Christian attempts to discern the signs of the times makes discouraging reading. At
Lesslie Newbigin
#68. I was reading a book ... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.
Tim Vine
#69. One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".
Andrew Roberts
#70. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
#71. I've always enjoyed reading history, particularly presidential biographies.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#72. Through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. ( ... ) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in another "history".
Mircea Eliade
#73. When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
Lynn Abbey
#74. We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words' ...
Janet Frame
#75. I did indulge myself in a lot of history reading, to inform myself as to who the real woman was. As far as other actresses' portrayals, though, I tried to stay clear. It muddles your process, I find.
Natalie
#76. Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the invaluable mental power we call judgment.
Sam Wineburg
#77. Although age has its normal limits, it may be extended by two things-the study of history and by travel. Reading history broadens one's perception of the creation of the world, while travel extends one's field of vision.
Mahmud Tarzi
#78. It made me think about a whole area of human activity that was not really a concern to me before that, because I was involved in reading Chinese history, or languages, or whatever.
Ron Silver
#79. You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.
You've got to become them.
(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)
David McCullough
#80. I never had a single female professor throughout my whole education, from the beginning of university to the end. Even all the books were about men; I never really liked reading books about the history of science, and I never really understood why.
Margaret Geller
#81. We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
Sara Sheridan
#83. History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.
Sara Sheridan
#84. Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts - tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.
Jonathan D. Spence
#85. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
Roger Ebert
#86. I believe the fast track to atheism is reading the Bible. I've read it three times all the way through. It's a big part of our culture, a big part of our history. I don't just read things I agree with.
Penn Jillette
#87. Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.
Chris Crutcher
#88. I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.
Daniel Woodrell
#89. 'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#90. Even a quick reading of Rizal's trial will prove that those who take Constantino's works uncritically are likewise guilty of "Veneration Without Understanding." Since there is so much fiction and faction in history it is always essential to return to the sources.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
#91. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
Iain Banks
#92. Indeed the general natural Tendency of Reading good History, must be, to fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all Kinds, Publick Spirit, Fortitude.
Benjamin Franklin
#93. My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy
#94. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine.
Hugh Howey
#95. 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
#96. From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.
Donald Kagan
#97. The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.
Neil Armstrong
#98. My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.
Tony Judt
#99. History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.
Gilbert Highet
#100. Victor, if you read this stuff, you can save people in the past from drowning. It's like time is a river, and it's nighttime, and you can hear people calling, Help, we're disappearing! So you stop and listen. That's how you save them.
Peter Gould
