History Quotes
No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.Richard Milhous Nixon
It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.John B. Gough
A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass. Sioux.American Indian Prove
The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.Robertson Davies
History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.Milton Friedman
News is history shot on the wing. The huntsmen from the Fourth Estate seek to bag only the peacock or the eagle of the swifting day.Gene Fowle
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.Russell Hoban
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.Thomas Carlyle
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1972)
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.Edward R. Murrow
If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people - A black people - who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.Martin Luther King, Jr.
If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.Alvin Toffle
When you read history it is quite astonishing to discover that there never was a day when men thought times were really good. Every generation in history has been haunted by the feeling of crisis.Harold Walke
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
If, after all, men cannot always make history have meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.Albert Camus
We are all citizens of history.Clifton Paul Fadiman
A country losing touch with its own history is like an old man losing his glasses, a distressing sight, at once vulnerable, unsure, and easily disoriented.George Walden
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built - In mental disorder which drives him towards self - Destruction.Arthur Koestle
History is made at night. Character is what you are in the dark.Lord John Whorfin
When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.Eugene V. Debs
History is fables agreed upon.Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire
The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings.George W. Bush, Inaugural address, 2001
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.Nikita Khrushchev
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - Ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (1918)
History repeats itself historians repeat each other.Philip Guedalla
History is full of surprises.Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Most history is a record of triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who made no nuisance of themselves in the world.Philip Howard
The history of science is everywhere speculative. It is a marvelous hiatory. It makes you proud to be a human being.Karl R. Poppe
Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.W. H. Auden
The true fanatic is a theocrat, someone who sees himself as acting on behalf of some super personal force the Race, the Party, History, the proletariat, the Poor, and so on. These absolve him from evil, hence he may safely do anything in their service.Lord Billingsley
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.Tom Stoppard
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.William James
What is history but a fable agreed upon.Napoleon Bonaparte
A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.Albert Coope
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.George Bernard Shaw
How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory", 1996
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.James Joyce
Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.Mark Beltaire
