Top 100 To History Quotes
#1. For me, clothing has always been connected to history. That's what draws me in.
Liz Goldwyn
#2. Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
Lord Acton
#3. The Jews' greatest contribution to history is dissatisfaction! We're a nation born to be discontented. Whatever exists we believe can be changed for the better.
Shimon Peres
#4. Around it are those countries which, according to History, constitute the civilised world ie, a world that can support historians
Terry Pratchett
#5. Science?is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.
Max Born
#6. The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
Katharine Anthony
#7. If certain Jewish communities had distinctive qualities, they were due to history, not biology.
Shlomo Sand
#8. When I started researching history in the 1960s, a lot of women about whom I've subsequently written were actually footnotes to history. There was a perception that women weren't important. And it's true. Women were seen historically as far inferior to men.
Alison Weir
#9. There is no life that does not contribute to history.
Dorothy West
#10. A theology that does not build on the past ignores our debt to history and naively overlooks the fact that the present is conditioned by history. A theology that relies upon the past evades the demands of the present.
Greg Nichols
#11. War should belong to the tragic past, to history: it should find no place on humanity's agenda for the future.
Pope John Paul II
#12. Whoever's not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This
Rick Yancey
#13. Submitting to history allows us to remember our society's past. Although writing and art express history, it's our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future.
K.P. Kollenborn
#14. Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#16. The complete encounter with the Lord will mark an end to history, but it will take place in history.
Gustavo Gutierrez
#17. I had serious training of painting styles from different historical periods ... But to have all this training is not enough to be an artist. You have to add a new page to history; otherwise you are not making a contribution. But making history is not easy.
Liu Dan
#18. We cannot leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people
Nikki Giovanni
#19. These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will.
Clara Bingham
#20. This cannot be stated too strongly: From the very beginning, Christianity tied itself to history. The most important claims of Christianity are historical claims, and on the facts of history the Christian religion must stand or fall.
Kevin DeYoung
#21. It is the vice of the journalist, I once wrote, to think that history can always be reduced to experience, and of the scholar to think that experience can always be reduced to history. History and experience are far more frequently out of sync, or running on parallel tracks.
Adam Gopnik
#22. Covering a historic event is perfectly legitimate. It's not sneaking into somebody's boudoir ... These people belong to history, and not to record that if you have the opportunity would be wrong.
Elliott Erwitt
#23. The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
Albert Jay Nock
#24. Humanity is creating an extinction event that will make every war ever fought a footnote to history. We belong to the only generation in history that can turn this around - we're one step away from greatness or the biggest disaster since the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.
Louie Psihoyos
#25. A thousand happy moments succumbed to history. It was the happiest hour of the year, worst time of our lives. I can still smell the ruins from that cold dark brute stormy October night.
Parul Wadhwa
#26. In Paris, I felt connected to history in a way I did not in America. Elderly men I passed in the Latin Quarter, with empty sleeves pinned to the shoulder of their jackets, reminded me of the not-so-distant war.
Kati Marton
#27. If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.
Beaumont Newhall
#28. The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Oscar Wilde
#29. For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.
Hannah Arendt
#30. I'm not just living in the tradition and culture and the past, I also want to be connected to the future. The Apple Watch connects me to the future. My watch connects me to history, to eternity.
Jean-Claude Biver
#31. Successful people pay more attention to their visions and goals than to history and the opinions of others.
Alan Cohen
#32. What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.
Adrienne Rich
#33. Amnesia and complete indifference to history (especially the history of technological amnesia) remain the defining features of contemporary Internet debate.
Evgeny Morozov
#34. The Bible is the only force known to history that has freed enitre nations from corruption while simultaneously giving them political freedom.
Vishal Mangalwadi
#35. hope and fear are just different aspects of the same submission to history. Sitting and istening to the same story, one can hope for a happy ending while another fears a tragedy. Neither is free.
Anonymous
#36. [I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#37. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
Damon Galgut
#38. Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them.
Joseph Addison
#39. Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war.
Kamal Haasan
#40. For me, it's more about being there, bearing witness to history, bearing witness to what's happening, what our country, the position our country is taking overseas. I want policy-makers to see the fruits of their decisions, basically, and to try and influence foreign policy.
Lynsey Addario
#41. I am not naturally inclined to history or geography - maybe that's why I like to sing about it, because it helps me remember.
Sufjan Stevens
#42. ...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history.
Procopius Of Caesarea
#43. Americans treat history like a cookbook. Whenever they are uncertain what to do next, they turn to history and look up the proper recipe, invariably designated the lesson of history.
Russell Baker
#44. The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.
Ken Wilber
#45. The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.
Ludwig Von Mises
#46. Historical fiction isn't history in the conventional sense and shouldn't be judged as such. The best historical novels are loyal to history, but it is a history absorbed and set to music
Daniel Aaron
#47. One important idea I hope is reflected in 'The Poe Shadow' is that fiction can add as much to history as nonfiction does.
Matthew Pearl
#48. We save the honor of Jesus when we restore His Person to life from the state of inanity to which the apologists have reduced it, and give it once more a living relation to history, which it certainly possessed.
Bruno Bauer
#49. Nation-building is never a 'done deal' confined to history already established.
Aberjhani
#50. But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.
Martin Heidegger
#51. It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.
Robert Fisk
#52. The general consensus among historians, among the ones who can handle the fact that 'Lincoln' is, in fact, historical fiction, is that we demonstrate enormous fidelity to history and that, beyond that, we've actually contributed a line of thinking about Lincoln's presidency that's somewhat original.
Tony Kushner
#53. My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.
Russell Banks
#54. Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
Antony Sher
#55. History is not "just one damn fact after another," as a cynic put it. There really are broad patterns to history, and the search for their explanation is as productive as it is fascinating.
Jared Diamond
#56. That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin.
C.S. Lewis
#57. I've always felt privileged to cover the White House and to have that ringside seat to history
Helen Thomas
#58. Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.
Jean Fernel
#59. It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.
Louis De Bernieres
#60. There may be a legal obligation to obey, but there will be no moral obligation to obey. When it comes to history, it will be the people who broke the law for freedom who will be remembered and honoured.
Tony Benn
#61. Great woman belong to history and to self sacrifice.
Leigh Hunt
#62. It's up to history to judge.
Pol Pot
#63. There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery.
Robert M. T. Hunter
#64. According to history, he wrote of humans originally having four arms, four legs, and a single head made up of two faces." I stared awkwardly at him. "But, in fear of their power, Zeus split them all in half, condemning them to a life of searching for their other half...
K.A. Poe
#65. I read and learned and fretted more about Canada after I left than I ever did while I was home. I absorbed anything I could on topics that ranged from Folklore to history to political mainifestos ... I ranted and raved and seethed about things beyond my control. In short I acted like a Canadian.
Will Ferguson
#66. What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.
Aldous Huxley
#67. The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.
Terry Pratchett
#68. I have been all men known to history , Wondering at the world and at time passing; I have seen evil , and the light blessing Innocent love under a spring sky .
R.S. Thomas
#69. For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.
Winston Churchill
#70. I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
#71. President Howard W. Hunter explained that the gospel of Jesus Christ, which gospel we teach and the ordinances of which we perform, is a global faith with an all-embracing message. It is neither confined nor partial nor subject to history or fashion.
Robert L. Millet
#72. Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word - to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.
William Sloane Coffin
#73. The leader of an Earth organization who makes a commitment to history - of humans living on Earth, to begin permanent settlement/occupation of not the moon, but of another planet - this leader will have a legacy for history that will supersede Columbus, Genghis Khan or almost any recognized leader.
Buzz Aldrin
#74. To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.
Thomas Jefferson
#75. The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life.
Aly Khan
#76. In America, much foreign policy seems contrived to be an exercise in political theory with no attention to history whatsoever. Yet there's a great reverence for history - though it's history as thumb-sucking, security blanket-nibbling self-congratulation.
Simon Schama
#77. We are all products of our time, vulnerable to history.
Han Suyin
#78. Ronad Reagan might go down to history as a man who in the end of this administration brought about the first nuclear arms reduction treaty, the first arms reduction treaty at all in the modern world, and this is quite something.
Helmut Schmidt
#79. To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).
Leopold Von Ranke
#80. 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
#81. And perhaps they too would one day be lost to history.
Susan Dennard
#82. Songs are often written by people who are witnesses to history,
George Nethercutt
#83. History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Jean Baudrillard
#84. Jesus was the most active resister known to history. His was nonviolence par excellence.
Mahatma Gandhi
#85. It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.
H.A.L. Fisher
#86. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
#87. The future is malleable, and to see it, you just have to listen to history and have a grand enough vision. - Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch - Developmental Genetics
Rachel Swaby
#88. Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.
Claude Bernard
#89. Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.
Rousas John Rushdoony
#90. No matter how good a public school teacher, he or she will always be required to teach the state's values and the state's perspective on subjects from sex to history and biology.
Cal Thomas
#91. History can't be left to fend for itself. For when it comes to history and beliefs and values, we turn our future on the lathe of the past.
Max De Pree
#92. Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed from race to race from age to age.
Kelly Miller
#93. I don't want to be a slave to history or facts. As long as I'm getting a good cursory understanding of what it is and I'm not drifting too far away at certain points, then I can play with the idea and take it anywhere I want to.
Scott Walker
#94. I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.
Alison Weir
#95. Even as regards Earth we are more committed to history than to geography, more committed to time than to space. History is endless. Place is limited.
Thomas Berry
#96. It felt like being in the center of the world, and I felt like I was a witness to history and I knew that the whole world was watching on television. So, I could feel the collective consciousness of the world focused on this little strip of land called Seattle.
Krist Novoselic
#97. The Indians used to be the only inhabitants of the Americas, but times change. Having perceived us as belonging to history, they are free to emote over us, to re-create us in their history-based understanding, and dismiss our present lives as archaic and irrelevant to the times.
Paula Gunn Allen
#98. Be bold in life. Seize the moment. There is no surrender, no retreat. There is only conquer or be conquered, victory or defeat. Anything less is to be forgotten to history.
Jeffrey Fry
#99. The actions of yesterday, the pretenses of tomorrow, and the presence of now, have forever added to history.
Brandy Nacole
#100. No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.
(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)
David McCullough
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