History Quotes

Since when have we Americans been expected to bow submissively to authority and speak with awe and reverence to those who represent us?

Peace is more precious than a piece of land.

Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

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

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

Most of man's problems upon this planet, in the long history of the race, have been met and solved either partially or as a whole by experiment based on common sense and carried out with courage.

History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

The men who make history have not time to write it.

Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?

The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.

Failure is impossible.

Italy is a geographical expression.

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.

Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.

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

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

Time is my greatest enemy.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

The wise only possess ideas; the greater part of mankind are possessed by them.

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

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.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history.

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

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

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

the main thing is to make history not to write it

History is like a constantly changing tree.

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

Ideas shape the course of history.

A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

Russians can give you arms but only the United States can give you a solution.

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.

Historical experience is written in blood and iron.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but to stand there and take it.

Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

Fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice cold and lonely as the North Pole.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

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

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge - myth is more potent than history - dreams are more powerful than facts - hope always triumphs over experience - laughter is the cure for grief - love is stronger than death

I think that this is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.

After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

History has always been a series of pendulum swings, but the individual doesn't have to get caught in that.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It's not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don't take issue with my view of the past. I just hope that people deal with the content of the film.

Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.

This is the worst President ever. He George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.

As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world ... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

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

Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

You can't set a hen in one morning and have chicken salad for lunch.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.

My ideal man is Benjamin Franklin-the figure in American history most worthy of emulation ... Franklin is my ideal of a whole man. ... Where are the life-size-or even pint-size-Benjamin Franklins of today?

If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

Christians should be ready for a change because Jesus was the greatest changer in history.

I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.

Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.

No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.

Legend remains victorious in spite of history.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

I'm thrilled, I'm grateful, I'm blessed. I played for the world's greatest professional sports team in history. Once a Dallas Cowboy, always a Dallas Cowboy.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

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.

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.

Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

History is the story of events, with praise or blame.

Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense.

History is a better guide than good intentions.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

While we read history we make history.

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

History is a vast early warning system.

I cannot be indifferent to the assassination of a member of my profession, We should be obliged to shut up business if we, the Kings, were to consider the assassination of Kings as of no consequence at all.

My whole written history is one big lie! I mean, I can't even believe my history.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God. It contains the history of the creation of the world, and of mankind.

Let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth's sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won.

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Grace can and does have a history.

There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

Based on what you know about him in history books, what do you think Abraham Lincoln would be doing if he were alive today? 1) Writing his memoirs of the Civil War. 2) Advising the President. 3) Desperately clawing at the inside of his coffin.

It's not a ladder we're climbing, it's literature we're producing. . . . We cannot possibly leave it to history as a discipline nor to sociology nor science nor economics to tell the story of our people.

The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.

The Thames is liquid history.

I have a dream today!

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

I haven't, in the 23 years that I have been in the uniformed services of the United States of America, ever violated an order - not one.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.

Throughout the history of the sport, the heavyweight champion has been... a reason to talk about boxing at the water cooler.

History is the distillation of rumour.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.

My life is really a history of observing forms and taking in imagery. I don't mean in a photographic way, I mean in a way of feeling them structurally,

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

The majority see the obstacles; the few see the objectives; history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

It's too bad I'm not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.

The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.

Libraries are not made, they grow.

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

I'm for the dreamers. The only really important things in history have been started by the dreamers. They never know what can't be done.

The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.

The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.

Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.

I have the opportunity to be part of swimming history. To take the sport to a new level would be an honor for me. There's no better time to try this than now.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

We know that government intervention in the free market, and Argentine history has shown this, absolutely ends in a boomerang.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

History is Philosophy teaching by example.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.

Despise the enemy strategically, but take him seriously tactically.

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.

Journalism as theater is what TV news is.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

The ruling passion, be it what it will. The ruling passion conquers reason still.

They were afraid, never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.

For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.

We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.

The industrial real estate market completed one of its strongest demand cycles in history as several factors ignited the fire. For projects coming on line in 2005, record-low interest rates during the design phase 12 to 18 months prior provided additional incentive for development and absorption.

We can learn from IBM's successful history that you don't have to have the best product to become number one. You don't even have to have a good product.

Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed from race to race from age to age.

I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old.

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Now is history as fast as the mind remembers.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

No greater nor more affectionate honor can be conferred on an American than to have a public school named after him.

It's obvious throughout secular and church history that significant legislation follows only after dramatic action.

For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

There is a long history in country music of songs celebrating drinking and lamenting drinking. Country songs for the most part have always been heavily rooted in reality. The first artists were the people next door. They would sing on their porch or in their living room or at a barn dance. They sang about what they knew, and a lot of that was drinking.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

There is no reason to repeat bad history.

The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning.

I couldn't say who I am, I haven't the remotest notion of myself; I am someone without antecedents, without a history, without a country, and on that I insist!

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

One of the strangest catastrophes that is in any history. A great king, with strong armies and mighty fleets, a great treasure and powerful allies, fell all at once, and his whole strength, like a spider's web, was... irrecoverably broken at a touch.

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

I don't compete with other discus throwers. I compete with my own history.

History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

History is written by the victors.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Happy is the nation without a history.

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

Roger King is, without a doubt, the greatest salesman in the history of anything. And I don't ever limit him just to television. He could sell you anything.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people.

Popularity is the pocket change of history. The true measure is courage. There will never be another Charlton Heston.

There were epochs in the history of humanity in which the writer was a sacred person. He wrote the sacred books, universal books, the codes, the epic, the oracles. Sentences inscribed on the walls of the crypts; examples in the portals of the temples. But in those times the writer was not an individual alone; he was the people.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

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.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

That great dust-heap called 'history'.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.

There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.

The engineer has been, and is, a maker of history

Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own fortune, and he inherits his own past.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

History admires the wise, but elevates the brave

The struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history with which we are earliest familiar; particularly in that of Greece, Rome, and England

It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisel

When the great history of trouble is written, my family will stand extremely high in the table of contents.

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half.

We must also teach science not as the bare body of fact, but more as human endeavor in its historic context-in the context of the effects of scientific thought on every kind of thought. We must teach it as an intellectual pursuit rather than as a body of tricks.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

Our history is not our destiny

History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation.

It is not observed in history that families improve with time.

What I am is a thinking, feeling human being compelled by history.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.

More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present.

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

There is properly no history, only biography.

There is no life that does not contribute to history.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.

Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial.

Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time.

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom

History is a pageant and not a philosophy.

History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends....

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.

History is the devil's scripture.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

History is more or less bunk.

High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there's nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.

Revolutions are not made for export.

Every memorable act in the history of the world is a triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved without it because it gives any challenge or any occupation, no mater how frightening or difficult, a new meaning. Without enthusiasm you are doomed to a life of mediocrity but with it you can accomplish miracles

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

War makes good history but peace is poor reading.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can —it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - or to make it the last.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

History is the record of encounters between character and circumstance.

At a certain point one ceases to defend a certain view of history; one must defend history itself.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.

The fate of a nation has often depended upon the good or bad digestion of a prime minister.

The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it.

History knows no resting place and no plateaus.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.

The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

Historic in a good sense, not historic in a sense of so we dropped bombs on everyone

I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.

History within itself cannot be transcended. ... In history itself there are only relative victories.

Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

Wit is the lowest form of humor.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.