Quotes about history

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“American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets.”

“History is moving pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”

“In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.”

“History is rarely made by reasonable men.”

“A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. […] Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

“Gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history.”

“The student is to read history actively not passively.”

“When he thought of his history, what resonated with him now was not all that he had suffered but the divine love that he believed had intervened to save him.”

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of people who oppressing them.”

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

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

“Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male freedom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in pre-history, is anywhere you kneel.”

“This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.”

“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

“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.”

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

“The past is history written in stone that can't be altered. The future is transitory and never guaranteed. Today is the only thing you can alter for certain. Make the most of it.”

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.”

“Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.”

“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.”

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.”

“A lot of our perception of history is influenced by inaccurate movies.”

“A king is history's slave.”

“Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not.”

“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”

“The 3-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with those three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.”

“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”

“In my mind, the men and women of NASA are history's modern pioneers. They attempt the impossible, accept failure, and then back to the drawing board while the rest of us stand back and criticize.”

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”

“India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”

“People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense-words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions-words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History”

“What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?”

“So I left him there alone to watch history repeat the same events retold again and again on his own.”

“The society whose citizens are willing to stand and fight is the one with the best chance of surviving long enough for history to even notice.”

“We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”

“I couldn’t miss Percy’s fifteenth birthday,” Poseidon said. “Why, if this were Sparta, Percy would be a man today!”

"That’s true,” Paul said. “I used to teach ancient history.”

Poseidon’s eyes twinkled. “That’s me. Ancient history.”

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.”

“What could be duller than past history!' Therese said, smiling. 'Maybe futures that won't have any history.”

“The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.”

“I have a history of disregarding orders. - Mitch Rapp”

“It’s my belief that the study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.”

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!”

“Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

“The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”

“Whenever I start a novel, I'm always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go 'what if?' and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.”

“Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”

“History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past”

“History, the way the teachers liked it, was a racetrack, a straight shot from start to finish line; life itself was more of a maze.”

“History says don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.”

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”

“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.”

“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.”

“But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history. Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects.”

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”

“You cannot amputate your history from your destiny, because that is redemption.”

“The British are the only people in history crass enough to have made revolutionaries out of Americans.”

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.”

“I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”

“History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.”

“History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.”

“My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.”

“She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.”

“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it’s done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.”

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.”

“Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.”

“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.”

“There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.”

“History has never been dominated by majorities, but only by dedicated minorities who stand unconditionally on their faith.”

“It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.”

“History does not care about the suffering of the individual. Only the outcome of their struggles.”

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

“A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.”

“As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he’ll look for his lessons.”

“History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.”

“Calvin: History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
p152”

“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.”

“I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

“The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do.”

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books…. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

“The history of free men is never really written by chance - but by choice. Their choice.”

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

“There is room in history for all of us.”

“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.”

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

“The basic fact is that no, this isnt ideal. Very few things are. Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.
-Heidi”

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

“I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables.”

“I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.”

“Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.”

“The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams.”

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”

“She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war.”

“Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.”

“The lesson of history is that no one learns.”

“I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.”

“The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.”

“The greatest changes in history have come when people were able to shake off what others told them to do.”