Quotes about history

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“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.”

“The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn't had time to do.”

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.”

“They were like two pieces of a failed star, drawn together by a shared history and a memory of illicit kisses.”

“In sum, U. S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.”

“History, if it has taught us anything at all, has taught us that the strange ideas we deride today will one day be our celebrated truths.”

“Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.”

“Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It only took a moment.”

“In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.”

“Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”

“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.”

“Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.”

“Getting to a higher spiritual level is like increasing your credit score. You get a lot more points for sinning and repenting than if you have no credit history at all.”

“History is not was, it is.”

“The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history—the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen”

“It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”

“Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.”

“History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.”

“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.”

“History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.”

“Maybe they didn't want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There's always one thing we depend on. And if someone takes it away all that's left is some story in a history class.”

“History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”

“I understand better than she'd imagine that history is indelible. You can mask it; you can patch it smooth and clear; but you always know what's hidden underneath.”

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

“Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.”

“Hugo is a raven, and, as such he knows many things. I, meanwhile, am Hodge Starkweathe, a professor of history, as such, I do not know nearly enough.”

“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”

“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

“History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse.”

“There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.”

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”

“The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that.”

“Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms”

“Sleep was the greatest invention in the history of mankind. When I was sleeping, I wasn’t feeling guilty, or miserable, or sad.”

“Throughout history, every period of enlightenment has been accompanied by darkness, pushing in opposition. Such are laws of nature and balance.”

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”

“There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.”

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.”

“And the things you can’t remember tell the things you can forget, that history puts a saint in every dream.”

“The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”

“The great courageous act that we must all do, is to have the courage to step out of our history and past so that we can live our dreams.”

“History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.”

“Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn’t agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?”

“History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.”

“Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”

“History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”

“History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.”

“And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”

“That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.”

“There was a certain history to this. While heavily pregnant with Amelia, she had asked him if she was radiant or if she just looked like a waddling duck. He told her she’d looked like a radiant duck. This had not been the correct answer.”

“History is never tidy.”

“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.”

“History in general is therefore the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea is Space.”

“Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.”

“History,' Mari muttered, as if she'd overheard his thoughts. 'Why do we need to know what happened before we were born?'

'So hopefully we get smarter and don't make the same mistakes again.”

“The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.”

“History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.”

“If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.”

“Human history is a Gaian dream.”

“History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.”

“A person could leave you so quickly. So much history and time and memories, but they snuck away from you, and other things took their place. How could you hold on? Wait. A bigger question. The biggest. How could you hold on and
let go?”

“We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.”

“People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel”

“that's the funny thing about mazes: what's baffling on the ground begins to makes sense when you can begin to rise above it, the better to understand your history and fix yourself". (p. 717)”

“My heart broke open and history fell in.”

“Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.”

“Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion.”

“One Child:
I hope it will be said we taught them to stand tall & proud, even in the face of history & the future was made new & whole for us all, one child at a time.”

“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”

“I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.”

“But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but, really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”

“It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.”

“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

“How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?”

“All of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”

“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.”

“Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.”

“Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.”

“Maybe your history just repeats and repeats until it batters you enough to snap the seams that hold you together”

“Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”

“The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.”

“It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master”

“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.”

“But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.”

“Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.”

“There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.”

“Our histories plan our futures.”

“Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives.”

“I'm of the glamorous ladies
At whose beckoning history shook.
But you are a man, and see only my pan,
So I stay at home with a book.”

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”

“the history of melancholia
includes all of us.”

“Do you not see how strange and wonderful that is? That all history balances on an affair of the human heart?”

“Longing on a large scale makes history.”