Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

We perceive that the schemers return again and again to common sense and labor. Such is the evidence of history.

We're in a political depression - a great political depression

We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.

We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

We will be remembered not for the power of our weapons but for the power of our compassion, our dedication to human welfare.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was which came to an end in August, 1914!

Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.

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

Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire, the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind; and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise the improvements of social life.

What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.

What if this present were the world's last night?

What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.

What is not recorded is not remembered.

What is past is prologue.

What is the fire in our belly but the eternal flame of a thousand ancestors.

What is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the fields and vallies, which a beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness?

Whatever is goode in its kinde ought to be preserv'd in respect for antiquity, as well as our present advantage, for destruction can be profitable to none but such as live by it.

What is still more to our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.

What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.

When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

What we learn from history is that people don't learn from history.

What would constitute useful history? That which should teach us our duties and our rights, without appearing to teach them.

When all the arguments have been forgotten, this central fact will remain. The two nations fought a single war, and their quarrels were the quarrels of brothers.

When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.

What most impresses us about great jurists is not their tenacious grasps of fine points, honed almost to invisibility; it is the moment when we are suddently aware of the sweep and direction of the law, and its place in the lives of men.

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy.

What you do is your history. What you set in motion is your legacy.

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

When you have big historic changes, there are going to be ups and downs... There are going to be peaks and valleys. Some things are going to go right. Some things are going to go wrong. But as long as the strategic direction is going in the right way, that's really what you have to judge.

When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.

When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.

When slavery is established in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.

When the drama of history is over, Jesus Christ will stand alone on the stage. All the great figures of history ... will realize that they have been but actors in a drama produced by another.

When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.

Which would you rather be, a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.

Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.

Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.

Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories.

Whether we like it or not, quantification in history is here to stay for reasons which the quantifiers themselves might not actively approve. We are becoming a numerate society: almost instinctively there seems now to be a greater degree of truth in evidence expressed numerically than in any literary evidence, no matter how shaky the statistical evidence, or acute the observing eye.