Quotes about history
page 9

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

Richelle Mead Bloodlines

Source: Bloodlines

People, Change

“I have become very good at clearing histories.”

David Levithan book Every Day

Source: Every Day

“For feeling, not events, is to me the essence of history.”

Christopher Pike book The Last Vampire

Source: The Last Vampire

Feeling

“And then there is our personal history. Memories only we share. Things not another living soul would understand.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

Soul, Understanding, Memory, Personality

“What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Plague of Doves

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 93

Life, World, Fear, Understanding

“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations”

Arthur Koestler book Darkness at Noon

Source: Darkness at Noon

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Truth, Reality

“Ideas shape the course of history.”

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) British economist

As quoted in The Peter Plan: A Proposal for Survival (1976) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 97
Attributed

Idea

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Source: Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)
Context: Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Intelligence, Idea, Time

“Patterns repeat themselves in history”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Source: The Last Olympian

“You could grow up in the city where history was made and still miss it all.”

Jonathan Lethem book The Fortress of Solitude

Source: The Fortress of Solitude

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Memory, Change

“Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it? The one inside, I mean. You can’t change history. You can’t change the world. All you can ever change is yourself.”

Jennifer Donnelly book Revolution

Source: Revolution

Life, World, Change

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

People, Learning, Time

“Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

“In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States

Personality, Dead

“History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living”

Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) British novelist, poet, dramatist, and travel writer

Way

“I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, there are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Question, Love

“Desire has no history…”

Susan Sontag book On Photography

Source: On Photography

“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Women

“Children are dying."
Lull nodded. "That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.”

Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates

Source: Deadhouse Gates

Children, World

“Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Problem

“The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) American philosopher

Love, God, Communication, Personality

“The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

"Credo" (1991); also in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), p. 360
1990s

Religion

“True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

Beauty

“Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.”

Judith Butler (1956) American philosopher and gender theorist

Love, Feeling

“Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtile; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Of Studies
Essays (1625)
Source: The Collected Works of Sir Francis Bacon

Men, Mathematics, Nature

“All of history is moving toward one great goal, the white-hot worship of God and His Son among all the peoples of the earth. Missions is not that goal. It is the means. And for that reason it is the second greatest human activity in the world.”

John Piper (1946) American writer

God, People, World

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”

Jared Diamond (1937) American scientist and author

Source: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

People

“Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Death, People, Mathematics

“Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943) American biographer

Housing

“…History is written by the rich, and so the poor get blamed for everything.”

Jeffrey D. Sachs (1954) American economist

"Good Reads" w:Good Reads, https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6440.Jeffrey_D_Sachs

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: Collected Fictions

God, Sea

“Moments are history. If you have enough of them, they become a story.”

Adriana Trigiani (1970) American film director

Source: The Shoemaker's Wife

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”

Philip Pullman book The Amber Spyglass

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Life, Wisdom, Stupidity

“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

Source: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“that's me. ancient history."

[Poseidon to Paul]”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

“The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

Christopher Hitchens book Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Source: Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Search, Sleep

“Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.”

Mary Karr (1955) American writer

Memory

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation and Empire

Source: Foundation and Empire

Law, Error

“Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.”

Stacy Schiff (1961) American female Author, Pulitzer Prize winner

Source: Cleopatra: A Life

Women

“The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can't quite bear to look at. I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history.”

Gillian Flynn book Dark Places

Source: Dark Places

People, Family, Box

“Neither a wise man or a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

As quoted in TIME magazine (6 October 1952)
1950s

Waiting, Future, Training

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction. It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952) for The Sea Around Us; also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91

Truth, Literature, Science

“K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Personality

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Nature

“History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.”

Holbrook Jackson (1874–1948) British journalist

Books

“Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Letter to Henry Cromwell (19 October 1709).
Source: Letters of the Late Alexander Pope, Esq. to a Lady. Never Before Published

Dogs

“History is written by the victors--and when there is no victors, it all winds up in the corporate shredders.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

Women, Men, Soul

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Source: The Collected Works

“You have an interesting history. Now people can generally be classified in to two groups: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. You clearly belong to the letter. Your fate is and will always be the fate of dreamers.”

Haruki Murakami book A Wild Sheep Chase

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 17, The Strange Man's Strange Tale

Fate, People

“America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Lie, Age, World, Future

“The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Music

“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

“She and I were still friends, but not best friends, not like we used to be. But we were still friends. She'd known me my whole life. It's hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Life, Parting

“The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.”

Richard K. Morgan (1965) British writer

Source: Thirteen

Way, Reading, Country

“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right…The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

222
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)
Source: Minority Report

Democracy, Intelligence, Fraud

“Most men have no purpose but to exist, Abraham; to pass quietly through history as minor characters upon a stage they cannot even see”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Men

“Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history?”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Feeling

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.”

Anthony Doerr book All the Light We Cannot See

Source: All the Light We Cannot See

“There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Truth, Personality

“Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true… we call it history.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

James Joyce Ulysses

Source: Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: Nestor

“Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990)

Beer, Question

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

Source: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Beauty

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge —
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts —
That hope always triumphs over experience —
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

"Credo" at his official website http://robertfulghum.com/index.php/fulghumweb/credo/; this may be partly influenced by remarks of Albert Einstein in "What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck" The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929): I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. <br class="br">Source: All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

Love, Death, Dreams, Hope

“And it was because of their long history that he searched for something to say, something that would get them back to where they had been.

All that came to him was…”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover Mine

“The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Love, Pain, Truth, Books

“You see gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history rather than simply repeat it. Humans can… how do you moderns say it… think outside the cup.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God, Thinking, Change

“It's surprising how often history is decided by something as trival as bad shellfish.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: The Battle for Skandia

“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Memory, Victory

“The only thing that made me, or any of us, special was that no one in the whole of history would ever see the universe exactly the same way any other of us saw it.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Source: Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

Way, Universe

“History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”

R. Scott Bakker book The Darkness That Comes Before

Source: The Darkness That Comes Before

Men, Thinking, Passion

“Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.”

Lauren Willig (1977) American author

Books, Feeling

“I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.”

Bill Bryson book At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Source: At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Age, Time

“Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.”

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

Secret, Study

“You killed more people than anybody in history."

"Be the best at whatever you do, that's what my mother always told me.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

People

“Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Variant: Those who don't build must burn.
Source: Fahrenheit 451

“Throughout history, people with new ideas—who think differently and try to change things—have always been called troublemakers.”

Richelle Mead Shadow Kiss

Source: Shadow Kiss

People, Idea, Thinking, Change

“A legend is merely a history man decided to bugger.”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Hunt the Moon

“The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing., nothing but mutations.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

Source: Roland Barthes

Pleasure, Art

“The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Soul, Evil, Change, Heart

“If you don't think you were born to run you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.”

Christopher McDougall (1962) American journalist and writer

Source: Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Thinking

“I don’t know about birds
nor do I know the history of fire.
But I believe that my solitude should have wings”

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) Argentinian poet

Bird, Solitude

“Scars are stories, history written on the body”

Kathryn Harrison (1961) Author

“They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives…”

Franz Kafka book The Great Wall of China

Source: The Great Wall of China

Soul, Sense, Change

“Artemis: If I win I'm a prodigy. If I lose then I'm mad. That is the way history is written.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Variant: If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose, then I'm crazy. That's the way history is written.
Source: Artemis Fowl (2001)

Way, Madness

“We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

“This is where you and I are headed…. Look for us in history books and you'll find us in the margins. Look for us in legends and you might just find us celebrated”

Scott Lynch (1978) American writer

Books

“But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Truth, World, Sadness, Dependency

“It's all very romantic," Gabriel said, and then frowned. "Or it would be, if my brother could get a word out without sounding like a choking frog. I fear he will not go down in history as one of the world's greatest wooers of women.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Women, World, Fear

“… history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Source: Dynamics of Faith

Love

“Then why can’t I bully you into procreating? (Wulf)
See! I’m the only human in history to have Viking yenta of his very own. God, how I wish my father had been a fertile man. (Chris)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

God

“Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter XV: "Recapitulation and Conclusion", page 421 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=449&itemID=F391&viewtype=image, in the sixth (1872) edition

Science