Quotes about history
page 20

Fritjof Capra photo
Joe Dante photo
Stanley Knowles photo

“One of the facts of history is that battles do not stay won. Those that matter have to be waged again and again.”

Stanley Knowles (1908–1997) Canadian politician

Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 7, Program, p. 80

Russell T. Davies photo

“Because it's the best idea ever invented in the history of the world!”

Russell T. Davies (1963) Screenwriter, former executive producer of Doctor Who

Russell T. Davies, responding to the question, "Why do you think people love Doctor Who so much?" on BBC Wales Today (20 July 2004)

Michelle Obama photo
David Graeber photo

“In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, "The Myth of Barter", p. 40

James K. Morrow photo
George Saintsbury photo

“[It] is the unbroken testimony of all history that alcoholic liquors have been used by the strongest, wisest, handsomest, and in every way best races of all times.”

George Saintsbury (1845–1933) British literary critic

Notes on a Cellar-Book (1920; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008) p. 32

Charles Stross photo
Robert Fisk photo

“And history`s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Source: The Great War for Civilization (2005), Chapter 11: 'Fifty Thousand Miles From Palestine' (page 464)

Harry V. Jaffa photo
Jack Kevorkian photo

“When history looks back, it will prove what I'll die knowing.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Between the dying and the dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian's life and the battle to Legalize Euthanasia"‎ - Page 247 - by Neal Nicol, Harry Wylie - 2006
2000s, 2006

Sister Nivedita photo
Anish Kapoor photo

“It's a building with a curious, difficult history that is inexorably linked to the history of Berlin, [he said] That's very potent. You can't make a show here without some reference to all of that. And it certainly makes a show here so much more interesting.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

On the neo-renaissance pile in the centre of Berlin, which he created as a challenge and an inspiration.

Géza Vermès photo
Gustav Stresemann photo

“I hope that you will be in agreement with me when I beg you to do everything possible to prevent Hindenburg's retirement. We must under no circumstances bear the responsibility before the bar of history for having overthrown Hindenburg. I feel that even the abdication of the Kaiser would be easier to bear than the retirement of Hindenburg.”

Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) German politician, statesman, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Letter to the Chief of the National Liberal Party in Prussia, quoted in W. M. Knight-Patterson, Germany. From Defeat to Conquest 1913-1933 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), p. 208, n. 2
1910s

Richard Rodríguez photo
John Gray photo
Patrick Swift photo
John Adams photo
Elie Wiesel photo

“From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace.. . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.”

Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor

As quoted in "Is World Peace on the Horizon?", in The Watchtower (15 April 1991)

Charlton Heston photo
Frederick Russell Burnham photo

“As far as we can look back into history, the downfall of any nation can be traced from the moment that nation became timid about spending its best blood.”

Frederick Russell Burnham (1861–1947) father of scouting; military scout; soldier of fortune; oil man; writer; rancher

Taking Chances (1944)

Michael Dell photo

“We have a long history here of integrating the technologies closer together. This is what customers have been asking us to do. It is what we are doing. It is working extremely well. There is much, much more to come here.”

Michael Dell (1965) Businessman, CEO

CRN: "Michael Dell: 'Much, Much More To Come' On Dell EMC VMware Integration" https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/300104941/michael-dell-much-much-more-to-come-on-dell-emc-vmware-integration.htm (11 June 2018)

Austen Henry Layard photo
Jiddu Krishnamurti photo
Aldo Capitini photo

“I can’t appreciate someone else’s history if I’m forced to reject and feel ashamed about mine.”

Jim Goad (1961) Author, publisher

The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks and White Trash Became America's Scapegoats (Simon & Schuster, 1997)

Immortal Technique photo

“I hate it when they tell us how far we came to be, as if our people's history started with slavery.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Leaving the Past
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

“The positions occupied by our troops presented a military situation unique in history. The force, in short, held a line possessing every possible military defect.”

Conclusion of his report on the failure of the Gallipoli campaign.
Quoted in "The Economist", 8th October 2011, p. 69

Khushwant Singh photo
Joseph Heller photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Howie Rose photo
Jim Butcher photo

“Harry Dresden: Sometimes the most remarkable things seem commonplace. I mean, when you think about it, jet travel is pretty freaking remarkable. You get in a plane, it defies the gravity of a entire planet by exploiting a loophole with air pressure, and it flies across distances that would take months or years to cross by any means of travel that has been significant for more than a century or three. You hurtle above the earth at enough speed to kill you instantly should you bump into something, and you can only breathe because someone built you a really good tin can that seems tight enough to hold in a decent amount of air. Hundreds of millions of man-hours of work and struggle and research, blood, sweat, tears and lives have gone into the history of air travel, and it has totally revolutionized the face of our planet and societies.
But get on any flight in the country, and I absolutely promise you that you will find someone who, in the face of all that incredible achievement, will be willing to complain about the drinks. The drinks, people. That was me on the staircase to Chicago-Over-Chicago. Yes, I was standing on nothing but congealed starlight. Yes, I was walking up through a savage storm, the wind threatening to tear me off and throw me into the freezing waters of lake Michigan far below. Yes, I was using a legendary and enchanted means of travel to transcend the border between one dimension and the next, and on my way to an epic struggle between ancient and elemental forces. But all I could think to say, between panting breaths, was, "Yeah. Sure. They couldn't possibly have made this an escalator."”

The Dresden Files, Summer Knight (2002)

Christopher Hitchens photo

“This sprawling epic is as lively as a natural history museum diorama.”

Stephanie Zacharek (1963) American film critic

Review http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/03/07/10_000_bc/ of 10,000 BC (2008)

Mary McCarthy photo
Howard F. Lyman photo
Jefferson Davis photo

“Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Scotland & The Scottish People https://books.google.com/books?id=NINHAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=scotland+%26+the+scottish+people&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIuKPUmZGkyAIVQ5qACh0kewz7#v=onepage&q=scotland%20%26%20the%20scottish%20people&f=false

Karl Barth photo

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Karl Barth Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

Aron Ra photo
Michael Lewis photo
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Paul Krugman photo
Pierre Hadot photo

“It is misinterpretation and incomprehension which, very often, provoked an important evolution in the history of philosophy and which, notably, led to the appearance of new notions.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

Ce sont les contresens et les incompréhensions qui, très souvent, ont provoqué une évolution importante dans l’histoire de la philosophie, et qui, notamment, ont fait apparaître des notions nouvelles.
Études de philosophie ancienne (1998)

“It is… ironic that, given its subsequent history of Jew-hatred, Christianity should become the vehicle by which Jewish values entered the mainstream.”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian

Niccolo Machiavelli photo
Bill Thompson photo
Cesar Chavez photo

“Across the San Joaquin Valley, across California, across the entire Southwest of the United States, wherever there are Mexican people, wherever there are farm workers, our movement is spreading like flames across ad dry plain. Our pilgrimage is the match that will light our cause for all farm workers to see what is happening here, so that they may do as we have done. The time has come for the liberation of the poor farm worker.
History is on our side. May the strike go on! Viva la causa!”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

A similar statement (perhaps used in a later declaration) has been quoted at the UFW site http://www.ufw.org/_page.php?menu=research&inc=history/09.html: "Across the San Joaquin valley, across California, across the entire nation, wherever there are injustices against men and women and children who work in the fields — there you will see our flags — with the black eagle with the white and red background, flying. Our movement is spreading like flames across a dry plain."
The Plan of Delano (1965)

David Mitchell photo
Edward Jenks photo
William Wordsworth photo

“Those old credulities, to Nature dear,
Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of history?”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Memorials of a Tour in Italy, iv
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Charles Sanders Peirce photo
Ludwig Feuerbach photo

“The history of philosophical system is the picture gallery of reason.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 68
Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839)

C. D. Broad photo
Lloyd deMause photo
China Miéville photo

“The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.”

Part 3 “Wineland”, chapter 12 (p. 130)
Iron Council (2004)

Max Weber photo

“We face today two practical dilemmas. The first can be succinctly described as the return of the ‘social question’. For Victorian reformers—or American activists of the pre-1914 age of reform—the challenge posed by the social question of their time was straightforward: how was a liberal society to respond to the poverty, overcrowding, dirt, malnutrition and ill health of the new industrial cities? How were the working masses to be brought into the community—as voters, as citizens, as participants—without upheaval, protest and even revolution? What should be done to alleviate the suffering and injustices to which the urban working masses were now exposed and how was the ruling elite of the day to be brought to see the need for change?
The history of the 20th century West is in large measure the history of efforts to answer these questions. The responses proved spectacularly successful: not only was revolution avoided but the industrial proletariat was integrated to a remarkable degree. Only in countries where any liberal reform was prevented by authoritarian rulers did the social question rephrase itself as a political challenge, typically ending in violent confrontation. In the middle of the 19th century, sharp-eyed observers like Karl Marx had taken it for granted that the only way the inequities of industrial capitalism could be overcome was by revolution. The idea that they could be dissolved peacefully into New Deals, Great Societies and welfare states simply never would have occurred to him.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Ill Fares the Land (2010), Ch. 5 : What Is to be Done?

Yuval Noah Harari photo
Christopher Hitchens photo
W. S. Gilbert photo
Pope John Paul II photo

“Truth can never be confined to time and culture; in history it is known, but it also reaches beyond history.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998
Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

Wendy Doniger photo
Robert E. Howard photo
John F. Kennedy photo
Joseph Chamberlain photo
Carl Friedrich Gauss photo
John Maynard Keynes photo

“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.”

Source: Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Laissez-faire (1926), Ch. 1

Fred Polak photo
Carl Sagan photo
Giovanni Gentile photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“The pending direction of society rests more than any time in recorded history on the fulcrum of a human finger.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel photo

“History is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.”

Variant, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975): History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.
Die Weltgeschichte ist nicht der Boden des Glücks. Die Perioden des Glücks sind leere Blätter in ihr.
General Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Subhash Kak photo

“History is scraps of evidence joined by the glue of imagination.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Wishing Tree (2015)

Robert Aumann photo

“War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war.”

Robert Aumann (1930) Israeli-American mathematician

Source: War and peace (2005), p. 1

Marc Chagall photo
Jean Baudrillard photo

“Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
New millennium

Bart D. Ehrman photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Sten Nadolny photo
Enoch Powell photo
Shaun Ellis photo
James M. McPherson photo

“The unending quest of historians for understanding the past — that is, 'revisionism' — is what makes history vital and meaningful.”

James M. McPherson (1936) American historian

James M. McPherson. "Revisionist Historians" https://web.archive.org/web/20040623155609/http://historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2003/0309/0309pre1.cfm (September 2003), Perspectives, American Historical Association.
2000s

Harry V. Jaffa photo