Quotes about history

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Ideas shape the course of history.”

“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.”

“Patterns repeat themselves in history”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“Desire has no history…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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..”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“that's me. ancient history."

[Poseidon to Paul]”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“You killed more people than anybody in history."

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Scars are stories, history written on the body”

“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…”

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

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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)”

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

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.”

“The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.”

“Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.”

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”