The History Boys Quotes

#1. Playing Sgt, Trotter in 'The Mousetrap' is the same as playing Scripps in 'The History Boys,' in the sense that they're dream roles that I've always wanted to do. The fact they're letting me do this professionally and I'm getting paid for it, I find astonishing.

Thomas Howes

#2. In New York, I get people coming up to me because 'The History Boys' was such a hit on Broadway, and they show the film all the time on cable over there, so people recognise you.

Samuel Barnett

#3. History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.

Andrew Smith

#4. [London is] one of the best cities in the world. There is just so much culture there and so much history and so much diversity. It's just a perfect place to grow up. I studied at the Guildhall every Saturday so I'd always be in town every weekend doing that. I was kind of a city boy really.

Douglas Booth

#5. Polygamy has an ancient history and is legal in many parts of the world. I find the rules of polygamy to be damaging and it's potentially dangerous to young girls and terrible for "excess" boys. But polyamory is supposed to be a more equal arrangement among agreeing adults.

Emily Yoffe

#6. It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

Elizabeth Kostova

#7. What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole? What if history was not a reasonable citizen, but a madman full of paranoid guile and these boys his agents, his big surprise! His own revenge?

Ralph Ellison

#8. A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

Henry Ward Beecher

#9. Harry was a bright boy. And like many bright boys, he had a little mischief in him.

Patrick Yee

#10. History does show that boys who dance are far more likely to pass along their genes than boys who don't.
Boys who dance are genetic volcanoes.

Andrew Smith

#11. Maybe that's why I'd been chosen to become the first female Reaper in history. I think the boys had been losing too many souls.

Tish Thawer

#12. Learn from examples in history lest thou be made an example

John Boys

#13. What if history was changed? slavery reversed
Would black ladies see white boys and clinch they purse?

Fredro Starr

#14. Boys forget what their country means by just reading 'The Land of the Free' in history books. Then they get to be men. They forget even more. Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in books.

Jefferson Smith

#15. History will show that patient boys with a sense of humor, who can dance, tend to have more opportunities to participate in the evolution of the species than boys who give up and mope quietly on the sidelines

Andrew Smith

#16. Truth and History. 21 Men. The Boy Bandit King - He Died As He Lived.

Billy The Kid

#17. I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.

Theodore Roosevelt

#18. The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.

Noah Webster

#19. Physical development was alleged to assist spiritual and intellectual development, while also helping safeguard boys from the 'solitary and sexual sin' of masturbation.

Martin Crotty

#20. Floyd Paterson? Boy, he's the complete opposite to me. He no way like me.They go down in history for just being athletes. I'm getting more praise and credit for doing what I'm doing now on this show than coming here and beating five of your English champions.

Muhammad Ali

#21. God doesn't do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, "Can I be excused the Crucifixion?" No!

Alan Bennett

#22. Men and boys always want to go fight. They are always looking for a reason to go to war. It is the saddest thing. They have this abiding notion that war is fun. And no history lesson will convince them differently.

Kate DiCamillo

#23. Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

Hilary Mantel

#24. Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.

Robert Falcon Scott

#25. I don't claim to have any special interest in natural history, but as a boy I was made aware of the annual fluctuations in the number of game animals and the need to adjust the cull to the size of the surplus population.

Prince Philip

#26. Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.

Andrea Dworkin

#27. Boys did not go to work on the railroad simply because their fathers did. What fetched them were sights and sounds of moving trains, and above all the whistle of a locomotive. I've heard of the call of the wild, the call of the law, the call of the church. There is also the call of the railroad.

Gary Krist

#28. Wicked eyes are not a good prospect for seminary boys. They want a gentle, soft sort of wife, not a wife who looks as though she may sprout wings and carry off the young children of the village. ~Maria "Smythe

Gwenn Wright

#29. In the whole history of my letters, of my liking boys, not once has a boy liked me back at the same time as I liked him. It was always me alone, longing after a boy, and that was fine, that was safe

Jenny Han

#30. 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

#31. If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

Justina Chen

#32. Five thousand boys and girls under the age of sixteen were estimated to have fought in the defense of Berlin. Five hundred survived.

Andrei Cherny

#33. The true history of Vietnamese civilian suffering does not fit comfortably into America's preferred postwar narrative - the tale of a conflict nobly fought by responsible commanders and good American boys, who should not be tainted by the occasional mistakes of a few 'bad apples' in their midst.

Nick Turse

#34. Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory ... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

Alfred Adler