Quotes about history

A collection of quotes on the topic of history, use, people, world.

Best quotes about history

“Live in the moment. Moments make history.”

Nikki Sixx (1958) American musician

Source: This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx

“Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

“We learn from history that we don't learn from history!”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Often attributed to Desmond Tutu, actual source is G. W. F Hegel: What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)
Misattributed

“History is at once freedom and necessity.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971).

“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

“History is written by the victors.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Origins unclear. Earliest known match in print comes from 1970, in a collection called “Neo Poems” by Canadian artist John Robert Colombo, who recalled reading it sometime in the 1960s. Twain did say "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." in the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day”. A thematic precursor, "History May Not Repeat, But It Looks Alike", appears in a 1941 article by Chicago Tribune in Illinois. (Source: Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/) Misattributed

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

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

“History is written by the winners.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Context: During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.

Nikki Sixx quote: “Live in the moment. Moments make history.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón quote: “Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

+ 1 quote

Chuck Palahniuk quote: “History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.”

Quotes about history

“The history of the castle at Wiśnicz Nowy is enlivened by many legends. Many well-known artists visited the castle in centuries past. Till now, many elements of old architecture (towers, chapel) have survived, together with some details of interior design.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

The castle of Kmita and Lubomirski at Wiśnicz Nowy, "Aura" 2, 1991-02, p. 18-20. http://agro.icm.edu.pl/agro/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-bd5a073d-07bd-4353-9edc-6bf8ea3d43c5?q=de70f1df-826d-4538-9cee-535aa9902521$5&qt=IN_PAGE

Past

“Nature in fact the best and wisest is an architect and urban planner. (…) The history of establishing gardens and orchards throughout the centuries in Poland is worth knowing, taking into consideration changes in fashions and the foreign influences. Unfortunately, not many objects from those days manifesting the love of nature by man have remained till the present days.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

Gardens and orchards in the old Poland, "Aura" 11, 1987-11, p.17-18. http://pbn.nauka.gov.pl/sedno-webapp/works/508860

Love, Fashion, Nature, Change

“In Bolków there is a monumental Piast dynasty castle, one of the largest fortresses of the Świdnica Duchy. This stronghold, erected in the 13th century, defended nearby trade routes. Its monumental walls are still very impressive, stirring the imagination. This fortress is testimony to the dramatic history of this part of Central Europe.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

Bolków castle: A fortress of the Piast dynasty from Świdnica-Jawor, "Aura" 12, 1996-12, p. 23-24. http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-article-c77d83b5-69ec-4e41-b36d-878be4a1cf48?q=264a0585-9279-4717-bb47-4de1ebea3787$7&qt=IN_PAGE

Imagination, Parting

“Jewish history is full of suffering and terrible sorrow. But it is also full of immeasurable joy. We honor the suffering through remembrance. We honor the joy through celebration.”

Megan Marie Hart (1983) American opera singer

From "Persönliche Notiz", in the recital program for the opening event of festival year "100 days, 1700 years – Jewish life in Darmstadt". https://www.darmstadt-tourismus.de/en/visit/events/events/artikel/detail/juedisches-leben-in-darmstadt-festjahr-100-tage-1700-jahre.html Liedgut – Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin (2021), p. 2 http://web.archive.org/web/20210902070031/https://staatstheater-darmstadt.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/produktion/programmbuch/994?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22210831_PH_Liedgut_web.pdf%22&response-cache-control=public&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAUCI3T77LT4YWGJ7O%2F20210902%2Feu-central-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20210902T070031Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=600&X-Amz-Signature=d36591acd16fc78b29808a50bfaf03d75dc5d97aaab1945548d8ad24040d4a9d. Original: (de) Jüdische Geschichte ist voll von Leiden und schrecklichem Kummer. Aber sie ist auch voll von unermesslicher Freude. Wir ehren das Leiden durch Erinnern. Wir ehren die Freude durch Feiern.

Suffering, Joy

“It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg

Love, Life, World, Religion

“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and …

Beauty, Peaceful, Nature, Fight

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it's called the present.”

Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) American historian

Deep, Inspirational, Funny, Hope

“If you want to make history, you have to do historic things.”

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player

Making love

“People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Life, God, People, Future

“France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

People

“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Learning

“God is the one who always remembers those whom history has forgotten.”

Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566) Spanish Dominican friar, historian, and social reformer

God

“Like the old Indian proverb says, do not judge a man until you've walked 2 moons in his moccasins.
Most people don't know me, that is why they write such things in which most is not true. I cry very very often because it hurts and I worry about the children, all my children all over the world, I live for them.
If a man could say nothing against a character but what he could prove, history could not be written.
Animals strike not from malice but because they want to live, it is the same with those who criticize, they desire our blood not our pain. But still I must achieve I must seek truth in all things. I must endure for the power I was sent forth, for the world for the children.
But have mercy, for I've been bleeding a long time now. MJ.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Handwritten note published in People (12 October 1987)

Pain, Children, People, Truth

“History is always written by the victor and histories of the vanquished belong to a shrinking circle of those who were there.”

Joachim Peiper (1915–1976) SS officer

Parker, Hitler's Warrior, chapter 19, citing Peiper to Karl Wortmann, November 28, 1974 in note 27.

“To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion, and yet in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), First Inaugural address (1981)
Context: To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion, and yet in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. ”

Alice Morse Earle (1851–1911) American historian

Deep, Inspirational, Funny, Hope

“History will always have the final laugh whenever we try to apply the concept of equality to any generation.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

We consider the quote as suspicious, we have no evidence supporting authorship

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

This is often attributed to George Orwell book 1984. We cannot find it inside. Perharps this is post-mortem paraphrase of his quote "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past".

People, Way, Understanding

“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Sense

“Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Way, Forgiveness

“A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

Life, Idea, Birth

“Each day has its own destiny. Yesterday is history, today is opportunity while tomorrow is mystery.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

On destiny - "The Shock Of Reality" http://allafrica.com/stories/200908240244.html All Africa (August 24 2009)

“Well it's a risk to do a movie of this calibre on a subject matter and a point in history people are not very familiar with. It's a tough subject to sell - so salary-wise you have to make sacrifices to make a certain film happen. I would have been an idiot to pass up the opportunity to work with Mr Scorsese.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.popmonk.com/actors/leonardo-dicaprio/quotes-leonardo-dicaprio.htm

People

“With a bronze mirror, one can see whether he is properly attired; with history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a nation; with men as a mirror, one can see whether he is right or wrong. Now I've lost my faithful mirror by the death of Weizheng.”

Emperor Taizong of Tang (598–649) emperor of the Tang Dynasty

Quoted in: Yanqing Vanessa Ong et al. Memories unfolded: a guide to memories at Old Ford Factory, 2008, p. 50
Quoted regarding his advisor.Few men in history would be so frank and honest with their monarch and when Weizheng died, Taizong was overwhelmed with grief. The Emperor said to his ministers,

Death, Men, Faith, Understanding

“Traditionally Marxism attracts the oppressed. This, however, is not the case in the Arab nation… The socialist programs in Arab history did not always come from the poor, but from men who had known no oppression and became the leaders of the poor. The Arab nation has never been as class-conscious as other nations.”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

n.d., quoted in Saddam Hussein: a political biography (2002) by Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi.

Men

“The history of a man's soul, even the pettiest soul, is hardly less interesting and useful than the history of a whole people; especially when the former is the result of the observations of a mature mind upon itself, and has been written without any egotistical desire of arousing sympathy or astonishment. Rousseau's Confessions has precisely this defect – he read it to his friends.”

Mikhail Lermontov book A Hero of Our Time

A Hero of Our Time (1840; rev. 1841)

People, Soul, Reading

“Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined RSS wing of anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus were of equal status as to rights, social and religious and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession.”

Nathuram Godse (1910–1949) Assassin of Mahatma Gandhi

Nathuram Godse: Why I Assassinated Gandhi (1993)

Family, Religion, Thinking, Birth

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

“Truly great people in history never wanted to be great for themselves. All they wanted was the chance to do good for others and be close to God.”

Muhammad Ali book The Soul of a Butterfly

Source: The Soul of a Butterfly: Reflections on Life's Journey

God, People, Chance

“A Race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots.”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

Though often attributed to Garvey, this statement first appears in Charles Siefert's 1938 pamphlet, The Negro's or Ethiopian's Contribution to Art.
Misattributed

Knowledge, Tree

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

“What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Learning

“The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

People

“A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.”

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love

Source: Time Enough for Love (1973)

Past, Future

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur? ([http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/orator.shtml#120 120])

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Variant translation: To be ignorant of the past is to be forever a child.
Chapter XXXIV, section 120
Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 BC)
Variant: Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man, except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?

Life

“A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas — a place where history comes to life.”

Norman Cousins (1915–1990) American journalist

American Library Association Bulletin (Oct 1954).

Life, Idea, Birth

“By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.”

Dan Brown book The Da Vinci Code

Source: The Da Vinci Code

Nature

“America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“I stood close to the materialist conception of history, since in early womanhood I had inclined towards the realistic school.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

School

“In a culture, you can choose fear or love. It’s been my experience and my observation that humans on this planet feel more comfortable with fear rather than love and openness… I do know what history tells us about humans. And humans, they actually don’t feel very comfortable with openness and freedom.”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Quoted by Doug Rule in RuPaul: Ultimate Queen http://www.metroweekly.com/2016/04/ultimate-queen-rupaul/ (2016)

Love, Fear, Feeling, Freedom

“Diego is Diego and for me he is the greatest player of all time. Even after a million years I am not even going to be close to Maradona. I have no intention of comparing myself with Maradona - I want to make my own history for something I have achieved.”

Lionel Messi (1987) Argentine association football player

Response to the Maradona comparisons, 2010 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/players/lionel-messi/7527633/Barcelonas-Lionel-Messi-says-he-will-never-be-as-good-as-Diego-Maradona.html

Time

“I live and work with three basic assumptions, 1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.”

Vera Rubin (1928–2016) American astronomer

As quoted in NPR obituary http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/26/507022497/vera-rubin-who-confirmed-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88

Women, Men, Problem, Science

“In the newspapers there is insulting and stirring up hatred. Those irresponsible daubers!
The people are on the streets -- rampaging and protesting. The magnates are sitting at the green table and calmly finish their game.
Old Europe is dying.
Well, it's a crazy world! Thrift, Horatio!
As if by a mysterious power one feels compelled to go out onto the streets. The thoughts wander outside to the stage which is portraying a drama of world history -- not an edifying one, but still a drama. It gives the earnest observer a lot to think about.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

In den Zeitungen wird gehetzt und geschimpft. Diese verantwortungslosen Schmieranten!
Das Volk ist auf der Straße, randaliert und demonstriert. Die Herren sitzen am grünen Tisch und spielen seelenruhig ihre Partie zu Ende.
Die alte Europa geht in die Binsen.
Ja, es ist eine tolle Welt! Wirtschaft, Horatio!
Man wird wie von einer geheimnisvollen Macht auf die Straße gezogen. Die Gedanken sind draußen, wo sich ein Stück Weltgeschichte abspielt -- kein erhebendes zwar, aber ein Stück. Der ernsthafte Zuschauer hat viel dabei nachzudenken.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

People, World, Feeling, Game

“I have not written all this to complain: I have simply written the truth. I do not intend by what I have written to compliment myself: I have simply set down exactly what happened. Since I have made it a point in this history to write the truth of every matter and to set down no more than the reality of every event, as a consequence I have reported every good and evil I have seen of father and brother and set down the actuality of every fault and virtue of relative and stranger. May the reader excuse me; may the listener take me not to task.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

As quoted in The Baburnama : Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, as translated by Wheeler M. Thackston (2002), p. xxvii

Truth, Reality, Evil

“To write history is as important as to make history. If the writer does not remain true to the maker, then the unchanging truth takes on a quality that will confuse the humanity.”

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey

Original: Tarih yazmak, tarih yapmak kadar mühimdir. Yazan yapana sadık kalmazsa değişmeyen hakikat, insanlığı şaşırtacak bir mahiyet alır. Source: As quoted by Hasan Cemil Çambel in T.T.K. Belleten (1939), Vol: 3, no: 10, p. 272, Turkish Republic Ministry of Culture http://www.kultur.gov.tr/TR,25417/tarih.html

Truth

“Sir, you will see that they want to place the word ‘East Pakistan’ instead of ‘East Bengal’. We have demanded so many times that you should use Bengal instead of Pakistan. The world Bengal has a history, has a tradition of its own. You can change it only after the people have been consulted. If you want to change it, then we have to go back to Bengal and see whether Bengalis will accept it.”

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920–1975) Bengali revolutionary, founder ("father") of Bangladesh

Speaking to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in Karachi in 1955 during a debate on whether to adopt the One Unit scheme in Pakistan and divide the country into two provinces- East and West Pakistan. http://www.albd.org/autoalbd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=111&Itemid=44 Quote, Other

People, World, Change, Time

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

God, Age, World, Education

“The close relationship between politics and economics is neither neutral nor coincidental. Large governments evolve through history in order to protect large accumulations of property and wealth.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 1, p. 4

Wealth

“Cause the registration of firearms so that you can eventually confiscate them. Gun control, Communist idea. Lenin said, "One person with a gun can control a hundred people without one." Imagine this scene. You're standing in a bank trying to cash a check. Somebody runs in there, pulls out a gun, and says, "Everybody lay on the floor!" So everybody lies on the floor. Now imagine this scene. Every citizen is armed. The guy runs in the bank, "Lay on the floor!" Everybody else pulls out their guns. You lay on the floor while they all stomp on your head. Every dictator throughout history has wanted gun control. It's just a normal thing. You have to control the guns. Every dictator has wanted that. Gun control isn't about guns, it's about control. Somebody sent me this button as a joke, "Proudly Unarmed". Would you wear this? What does this say to a criminal? "Rob me!"”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Isn't that what it says?
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The dangers of evolution

People, Guy, Imagination, Idea

“We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1960s, A Time for Choosing (1964)
Context: As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.

War, Way, Star, Freedom

“History has no more validity than a novel.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

Revolution by Number

“The world and history will take from Russia much more than Russian missiles will take from Ukraine. Every lost life is an argument for Ukrainians and other free nations to perceive Russia exclusively as a threat generation after generation.”

Volodymyr Zelensky (1978) 6th President of Ukraine

2022, We, the world and history will take from Russia much more than Russian missiles will take from Ukraine (18 April 2022)]

World, Life

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Source: " A Case of Voluntary Ignorance http://www.christiebooks.com/ChristieBooksWP/2013/11/a-case-of-voluntary-ignorance-by-aldous-huxley/" in Collected Essays (1959)

Men, Learning

“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

Memory

“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic

Memory

“Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Tear

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic

“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.”

Maya Angelou And Still I Rise

"Still I Rise" - Full text online at poets.org http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15623 And Still I Rise (1978)

“History shows that there are no invincible armies and that there never have been.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Radio Address https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1941/07/03.htm (3 July 1941) Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews

“We have seen many rich persons, many powerful persons, many famous persons, many beautiful persons, many learned and scholarly persons, and persons in the renounced order of life unattached to material possessions. But we have never seen any one person who is unlimitedly and simultaneously wealthy, powerful, famous, beautiful, wise and unattached, like Kṛṣṇa, in the history of humanity. Kṛṣṇa, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, is a historical person who appeared on this earth 5,000 years ago. He stayed on this earth for 125 years and played exactly like a human being, but His activities were unparalleled. From the very moment of His appearance to the moment of His disappearance, every one of His activities is unparalleled in the history of the world, and therefore anyone who knows what we mean by Godhead will accept Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Personality of Godhead. No one is equal to the Godhead, and no one is greater than Him. That is the import of the familiar saying “God is great.”

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977) Indian guru

Source: Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead

Life, God, World, Beauty

“Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.”

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) Italian writer, politician, theorist, sociologist and linguist

Nature

“Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"Reflections on State and War" (2 December 2006) http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe17.html

Democracy, Communication, Idea, Freedom

“Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Source: The Origins of Totalitarianism

Effort, Time

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

Love, Life, Books, Feeling

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

World, Change

“In the history of modern socialism this is a phenomenon, that the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement has from national become international.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

What is to be Done? (1902)

“History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

Way

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”

Chinua Achebe (1930–2013) Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

People, World, Parting

“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

“History is written by the victor.”

Guillermo del Toro book The Night Eternal

Source: The Night Eternal

“Logic is the science not of external forms of thought, but of the laws of development "of all material, natural and spiritual things", i. e., of the development of the entire concrete content of the world and of its cognition, i. e., the sum-total, the conclusion of the History of knowledge of the world.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

World, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“Evolving our consciousness is not something we do only for ourselves — it is something we do also for others… for all others, and for the Earth. Because when we open up and let our body and mind feel our ties with others and with nature, we change ourselves, and change others around us. When a sufficient number of people pray or meditate together, or find another path to evolve their consciousness, other people are affected as well. More sick people heal, divorce and suicide rates drop, crime and violence diminish. When many people open up, a powerful force develops — a leap of consciousness takes place. All the great prophets and sages of history knew this, Jesus as well as the Buddha, Mohammed as well as Zoroaster — and more recently Bahá'u'lláh the same as Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin and the Dalai Lama.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: You Can Change the World (2003), p. 86.

People, Feeling, Nature, Suicide

“The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 397

Life, Study, Teachers, Time

“We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.
We affirm that the true story of capitalism is now beginning, because capitalism is not a system of oppression only, but is also a selection of values, a coordination of hierarchies, a more amply developed sense of individual responsibility.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Speech (21 June 1921), Ion Smeaton Munro, Through Fascism to World Power: A History of the Revolution in Italy, 27 January 2008 http://books.google.com/books?id=DML39RmvsmYC&pg=PA120&dq=%E2%80%9CWe+deny+your+internationalism%22+mussolini&lr=&sig=gTHVLgfaIKPCn_jW8f0phjDKrAI, 1920s

People, Sense, Passion

“The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales—I broke Elvis's records, I broke Beatles records—the minute it became the all-time best-selling album in the history of the Guinness Book of World Records, overnight they called me a freak. They called me a homosexual. They called me a child molester. They said I bleached my skin. They made everything to turn the public against me.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (9 July 2002)

Books, World, Time

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&lpg=PA149&dq=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&f=false

People, Secret, Feeling

“This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this presidential campaign: to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction — towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Children, Hope, Understanding, Time

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)

Books, Thinking, Reality, Learning

“David Eddings:‏ I'm afraid that ignorance, hate, racism, and violence will be exacerbated by silence. If speaking out is not an answer then what is?
Markus Persson:‏ Reading up on history, thinking for yourself, and not being an idiot.”

Markus Persson (1979) Swedish video game programmer

In Twitter (14 August 2017) https://twitter.com/notch/status/897158641962319878

Hate, Thinking, Silence, Reading

“Military history, especially Russian, is being studied poorly. We have a lot of unfair ridiculing of the old army despite the fact that we had such notable tsarist army generals as Suvorov, Kutuzov and Bagration who will always remain in the minds of the people as great Russian military leaders and who are revered in the Red Army as a legacy of the finest military traditions of the Russian soldier. There exists a harmful cult of Civil War heroes, while previous Russian military achievements are ignored. All of this leads to the ignoring of concrete historical experience despite the fact that history is the best teacher.”

Lev Mekhlis (1889–1953) Soviet politician

Mekhlis in 1940. Quoted in The People Need a Tsar: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931-1941, by D. L. Brandenberger & A. M. Dubrovsky, 1998

War, People, Study, Teachers

“Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"What is Science?" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien, Tribune (26 October 1945)

Education, Literature, Knowledge

“The prophet is appointed to oppose the king, and even more: history.”

Martin Buber (1878–1965) German Jewish Existentialist philosopher and theologian

BBC radio broadcast (1962), as quoted in The Great Thoughts (1984) by George Seldes

“To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

A Course of Positive Philosophy (1832 - 1842) [Six volumes]

Understanding, Science

“Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.… The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Remarks Against Going to War with Iraq (2 October 2002).
2000-03

People, World, Way, Communication

“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

"The Popular and the Realistic" (written 1938, published 1958), as translated in Brecht on Theatre (1964) edited and translated by John Willett.

Question

“"Is Wario A Libertarian" - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate,”

Dril Twitter user

Tweets by year, 2011

“As I said last year, each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its own people. Yet experience shows us that history is on the side of liberty, that the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and open governments. To put it simply, democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for our citizens.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

"Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City," September 23, 2010. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88483&st=&st1= 2010

People, Democracy, Country

“But then I ask myself, I have never truly known the man whose flank I have led one difficult and ascetic life for. Perhaps he has played with my idealism, taking advantage for dark scopes that he has held hidden within himself. How can I expect to know a man who has never opened his heart to me? Till now, I do not know what he really thought, knew or wanted. I was alone with my thoughts and my suspicions. And now, the veil that covered this statue has fallen to the ground and instead of an art work, a monster has revealed itself. Now we leave to the historians of the future the task of discussing if that statue was therefore a sin from the beginning, or was changed because of the circumstances. I continue to make the same error: I try to think back to his humble origins. But then I remember how many sons of these people have sealed their history with his name.”

Alfred Jodl (1890–1946) German general

About Hitler, Nuremberg Trial, March 10, 1946. Quoted in "Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader" by Percy Ernst Schramm.

Life, People, Art, Error

“It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto

“Perhaps the male in human society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it--and there is striking evidence at hand that they do--then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

Mr. Tesla Explains Why He Will Never Marry (1924)

Women, World, Way, Feeling

“One of the big failures in human history has been the agelong attempt to stop women painting their faces.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944) http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/ As I Please (1943–1947)

Women, Failure, Painting

“We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Letter to The Tribune (20 December 1940), later published in A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 (1999)

“Actual history occurs, so the speak, on credit; only subsequent development will decide retroactively if the current revolutionary violence will be forgiven, legitimated, or if it will continue to exert a pressure on the shoulders of the present generation as its guilt, as its unsettled debt.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

159
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“History is merely a list of surprises. … It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again. Please write that down.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Slapstick

Source: Slapstick (1976), Ch. 48

“This contradiction lies here: they wish God, and they wish humanity. They persist in connecting two terms which, once separated, can come together again only to destroy each other. They say in a single breath: "God and the liberty of man," "God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, prosperity of men" — regardless of the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For, if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, absolute master, and, if such a master exists, man is a slave; now, if he is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity are possible for him. In vain, flying in the face of good sense and all the teachings of history, do they represent their God as animated by the tenderest love of human liberty: a master, whoever he may be and however liberal he may desire to show himself, remains none the less always a master. His existence necessarily implies the slavery of all that is beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, only in one way could he serve human liberty — by ceasing to exist.”

Mikhail Bakunin book God and the State

God and the State (1871; publ. 1882)

Love, Men, God, Justice

“We will go down in history either as the world's greatest statesmen or its worst villains.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

Statement (1937); quoted in Great Powers and Outlaw States : Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (2004) by Gerry J. Simpson, p. 291

World

“For the history of the centuries that have passed since the birth of Christ nowhere reveals conditions like those of the present. There has never been such building and planting in the world. There has never been such gluttonous and varied eating and drinking as now. Wearing apparel has reached its limit in costliness. Who has ever heard of such commerce as now encircles the earth? There have arisen all kinds of art and sculpture, embroidery and engraving, the like of which has not been seen during the whole Christian era. In addition men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

Sermon for the Second Sunday in Advent, Luke 21:25-36 (1522) http://www.trinitylutheranms.org/MartinLuther/MLSermons/mlserms_original.html, as translated in The Precious and Sacred Writings of Martin Luther (1905) edited by John Nicholas Lenker

Men, World, Art, Boy

“Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private Property and Communism, p. 43.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

Communication, Nature, Freedom