Top 100 There Is A History Quotes
#1. If heads of states fail to seize the opportunity of our entry into the third millennium to provide for a better government of planet Earth, history will not forgive them - if there is a history.
Robert Muller
#2. There is a history that really happened, but none of us will ever know exactly what it was. The other one, the one we think we know, is made by us, and we remake it every time we look at it.
Marie Jakober
#3. One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.
Catherine Opie
#5. There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased, The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
William Shakespeare
#6. Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go.
Robert Goolrick
#7. There is a history of gay people pretending to be straight. I want to balance the sides. I'm a straight person pretending to be gay. I've had a lot of people to imitate. It's easy when you're British; we're camp by nature, anyway.
Robbie Williams
#8. There is a history of mental breakdowns in my family. It will never happen to me but it has happened to others in the family.
Brian Cox
#9. There is a history of footballers in my family; my granddad played for Notts County and my dad played at county level.
Matt Smith
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. There's a few in our history, where the person who creates it becomes almost the product itself. Jobs is one of those.
Joshua Michael Stern
#13. There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
Robert Anton Wilson
#14. I think one of the ways that these young singers got started is that they would end up in clubs. And a lot of them were mafia owned. And so there was almost an unspoken kind of mafia sponsorship, which is just a very interesting part of that area's music history.
John Lloyd Young
#15. The process of making natural history films is to try to prevent the animal knowing you are there, so you get glimpses of a non-human world, and that is a transporting thing.
David Attenborough
#16. I believe the twenty-first century can become the most important century of human history. I think a new reality is emerging. Whether this view is realistic or not, there is no harm in making an effort.
Dalai Lama XIV
#17. In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy ... to wit
the wag of a dog's tail.
Josh Billings
#18. There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.
Gloria Naylor
#19. The global financial collapse exposed the longstanding myth that commercial exchange is a primary institution. There are no examples in history where people created commercial markets and exchange before creating a culture.
Jeremy Rifkin
#20. There has never yet been a person in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.
Theodore Roosevelt
#21. 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
#22. There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history or nothing happens.
Coretta Scott King
#23. If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.
E. O. Wilson
#24. The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises.
Richard M. Nixon
#25. I look at history, there's not a government on the planet I respect. No country in history was ever safe to its women; internet sex is $100 billion a year industry, and 15-20 million men a day have sex with a child in sexual slavery.
Patch Adams
#26. 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
#27. Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope: There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized.
Annie Dillard
#28. If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.
Madeleine Albright
#29. Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.
Cornel West
#30. History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The
Ludwig Von Mises
#31. 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
#32. Mitterrand had a sense for symbols, and he was the first Socialist president since 1958. He wanted to show that there is historical continuity, a connection with the great figures of French history.
Francois Hollande
#33. I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.
Billy Bragg
#34. But how is that different from any other godforsaken stretch of coast half off the grid?" There were still dozens of them all across the country. Places that were poison to real-estate agents, with little infrastructure and a long history of distrust of the government.
Jeff VanderMeer
#35. The history of breast milk substitutes is a reminder that they've always been needed, but only in very recent human history has science allowed for a safe alternative. That there is even a debate over breast versus bottle is made possible by science.
Alice Callahan
#36. I think there's a lot of deep-rooted history in England with racing. Lots of Formula One teams are based there. Formula One is obviously a huge sport over in England and Europe.
Danica Patrick
#37. Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. ("The Plague")
Albert Camus
#38. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
Andre Suares
#39. Few writers in history have ever been 'politically correct' (a notion that rapidly changes in any case), and there's no reason to imagine that gay writers will ever suit their readers, especially since that readership is splintered into ghettos within ghettos.
Edmund White
#40. 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
#41. There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#42. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future.
Pearl S. Buck
#43. There is a camaraderie that grows up among those who work with old books and old papers, largely, I suspect, because we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward.
Peter Ackroyd
#44. There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.
Chloe Schama
#45. If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.
Elizabeth Janeway
#46. It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different."
"Not a mystery."
Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."
Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.
Kate Morton
#47. The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book.
Stacy Schiff
#48. Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney.
Sandi Toksvig
#49. Look, I get it. Loose stools are grosser than solid ones. But the censor is using the context of her own life history with all her hang-ups to answer the question, Is there a defensible ratio of fiber to water in this stool?
Sarah Silverman
#50. Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
Carl Sagan
#51. There comes a moment in history when ignorance is no longer a forgivable offense ... a moment when only wisdom has the power to absolve. - Bertrand Zobrist
Dan Brown
#52. One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.
P. J. O'Rourke
#53. But the whole history of America is quite different from Europe. People went there to get away from the intolerance and constraints of life in Europe. They sought liberty and opportunity; and their strong sense of purpose has over two centuries, helped create a new unity and pride in being American.
Margaret Thatcher
#54. The history of the world suggests that without love of God there is little likelihood of a love for man that does not become corrupt.
Francois Fenelon
#55. For something that's supposed to be secret, there is a lot of intelligence history. Every time I read one book, two more are published.
Alan Furst
#56. My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
Terence McKenna
#57. I was a daydreamer, and there is a lot of history and geography and science I missed out on because I was in my head. And I regret that.
Gillian Anderson
#58. It's important to remember there is a 20 year US. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. That represents a major transition in the history of the country and kind of reshaping partly in terms of just their direction of their attention.
Laurent Dubois
#59. For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.
Philip Short
#60. At a certain moment, when I started doing my own shows, I felt it would be really interesting to know what is the history of my profession. I realized that there was no book, which was kind of a shock.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#61. There is a set of balances and rhythms to a novel that we can't experience in real life. So I think there is a sense in which fiction can rescue history from confusion.
Don DeLillo
#62. That there should be so wide a difference between us Americans and these English, from whom we were divided, so to say, but the other day, is one of the most peculiar physiological phenomena that the history of the world will have afforded. As
Anthony Trollope
#63. There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.
William Damon
#64. There is the history of opinions which is hardly anything but a collection of human errors.
Voltaire
#65. History is not Time; nor is evolution. They are both consequences. Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul
Andrei Tarkovsky
#66. If you think about how broadcast mini-series approach historical events, there is a hagiography. There has been a soft, very glossy idea about history. And one of the things I like about Game of Thrones, for example, is just the grit and the authenticity.
John Landgraf
#67. Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt and brutal.
George Agnew Reid
#68. There were some ages in Western history that have occasionally been called Dark. They were dark, it is said, because in them learning declined, and progress paused, and men labored under the pall of belief. A cause-effect relationship is frequently felt to exist between the pause and the belief.
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke Of Norfolk
#69. In a way, there's nothing more intimate than a piece of jewelry. A painting is hung on somebody's wall. You put a piece of furniture in your home. But jewelry is worn by a person, so there is a fascination with the history of a piece.
Simon De Pury
#70. There is a long history of how DNA sequencing can bring certainty to people's lives.
Craig Venter
#71. New landscape of personal media has given us a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. But, luckily for us, there's some really wonderful stuff in it. And if history is any guide, as the media matures, the quality will continue to go up.
Esther Dyson
#72. Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.
Raymond Pettibon
#73. Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.
William Lane Craig
#74. There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy which must sadden, or at least soften every reflecting observer.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#75. The great thing about Pete and Peggy's storyline is that you barely have to do anything. There's so much there, so much history, that you can have them exchange a look and it's so loaded. So you honestly don't have to do anything.
Elisabeth Moss
#76. Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels.
Nigel Hamilton
#78. Don't tell me the sky is the limit - there's footprints on the Moon. - Overheard at a flee market.
Joseph Shellim
#79. There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.
Robert Nelson
#80. There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.
Noam Chomsky
#81. I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned.
LeVar Burton
#82. History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
Holbrook Jackson
#83. There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.
Salman Rushdie
#84. And this one thing at least is certain; whatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this.
John Henry Newman
#85. I think that America is a nation of faith. I do believe that. Certainly by way of heritage - there's a powerful Christian thread through all of American history.
John Edwards
#86. There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at critical points to create a power that governments cannot suppress.
Howard Zinn
#87. There is no denying it, our past stinks and seeps into our present. Occasionally I get such a potent whiff of history that my mind spins and my stomach lurches.
Jinat Rehana Begum
#88. A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there's nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.
Ian Caldwell
#89. You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
Chuck Close
#90. Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.
Arthur Miller
#91. Everybody knows they're on the Obama team: There isn't vice presidential vs. presidential division, there's not a generational pull. People have internalized that this is a real moment in history.
Rahm Emanuel
#92. On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons.
Victor Hugo
#93. Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.
Jamaica Kincaid
#94. There are some people in occult history who warned against using the Ouija Board, who said: "This is a dangerous door to the unconscious. Don't approach this thing."
Mitch Horowitz
#95. Photography as a subject is a good one. Its history is only about 150 years ... You only have to know about twenty-five or thirty names and that's it. All you need. In painting there are more than 1,000.
William Wegman
#96. I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.
Chaim Potok
#97. The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.
Brian Acton
#98. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#99. There is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
#100. Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
Ellen Glasgow
