History Quotes

History is more or less bunk.

Henry Ford

Regrets are idle yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

Charles Dudley Warne

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future.

Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazurus Long

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (p. 208)

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

Woody Allen

Never in the course of history, have so many owed so much to so few.

Winston Churchill, Speech about World War II

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

Erich Fromm

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Mark Twain

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

Bertie Forbes

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.

Mahatma Gandhi, _Gandhi, An Autobiography_, page 446

Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

Margaret Mead

If we fight a war and win it with H - Bombs, what history will remember is not the ideals we were fighting for but the methods we used to accomplish them. These methods will be compared to the warfare of Genghis Khan who ruthlessly killed every last inhabitant of Persia.

Hans A. Bethe

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

George Orwell, Essay: "The Prevention of Literature" (1946)

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.

Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books.

Thomas Carlyle

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner, quoted by Bill Moyers

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.

Sir Winston Churchill

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Maya Angelou

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present.

Lawrence K. Frank

History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.

George W. Bush

I respect every soldier, from every country, who serves beside us in the hard work of history. America is grateful, and America will not forget.

George W. Bush, September 2, 2004, The Republican National Convention, N. Y.

This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation. Saluting crew of the Apollo 11.

Richard Milhous Nixon

History teaches us that when a barbarian race confronts a sleeping culture, the barbarian always wins.

Arnold J. Toynbee

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

Mitch Ratcliffe

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

Churchill

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Carl Sagan

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

George Stanley McGovern

Morpheus Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Matrix, The

Some people make headlines while others make history.

Philip Elmer - DeWitt, in Time Magazine

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

Well behaved women seldom make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

In the South of California has gathered the larges and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations.

Farnsworth Crowde

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the governing of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address