Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.

While we remember that we are contending against brothers and fellow subjects, we must also remember that we are contending in this crisis for the fate of the British Empire.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

Who are the moneylenders? They are those who were driven out of the Temple by Christ Himself 2000 years ago. They are those who never work but live on fraud.

Whoever can conquer the street will one day conquer the state, for every form of power politics and any dictatorship-run state has its roots in the street.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the truth too near the heels it may haply strike out his teeth.

Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness - and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.

Why change the world? Change worlds!

Why did the Germans and Japanese keep fighting after 1943 when every rational hope of victory had disappeared?

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.

With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.

With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.

Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, a revolution and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realise during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany's plight.

With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.

With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.

Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.

Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.

Women more than men can strip war of its glamour and its out-of-date heroisms and patriotisms, and see it as a demon of destruction and hideous wrong.

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

(World War I) was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

You can't say civilization don't advance... in every war they kill you in a new way.

Yet the arts of Severus cannot be justified by the most ample privileges of state reason. He promised only to betray; he flattered only to ruin; and however he might occasionally bind himself by oaths and treaties, his conscience, obsequious to his interest, always released him from the inconvenient obligation.

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

You and I were long friends: you are now my enemy, and I am yours.

You can decide to invade Russia at dinner, pick Waterloo for battle on a whim. It's the details, the small stuff. Its easy to gamble a million lives. Whats hard is to see how that can hurt one single person. And if you cant keep that straight, hell, you'll lose your humanity.

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

A bad leader wouldn't stress the importance of staying together to stop the enemy. You want peace? You can't forgive the enemy, if you can't forgive your men for losing faith. You can't force every one single Union deserter to fight, but I know, only you can inspire every deserter to fight for their cause." - Amelia Raht

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

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.

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

A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.

About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8. billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combined to form particularly large and intricate structures called organisms. The story of organisms is called biology. About 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species Homo sapiens started to form even more elaborate structures called cultures. The subsequent development of these human cultures is called history.

Absolutely not," his friend exclaimed. "That is exactly what I am denying. World history is a race with time, a scramble for profit, for power, for treasures. What counts is who has the strength, luck, or vulgarity not to miss his opportunity. The achievements of thought, of culture, of art are just the opposite. They are always an escape from the serfdom of time, man crawling out of the muck of his instincts and out of his sluggishness and climbing to a higher plane, to timelessness, liberation from time, divinity. They are utterly unhistorical and antihistorical.

You know I am given to antiquarian and genealogical pursuits. An old family letter is a delight to my eyes. I can prowl in old trunks of letters by the day with undiminished zest.

You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I'm innocent. You've got to believe I'm innocent. If you don't, take my job.

you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be.

You realise Group Captain that this might be the most important weather forecast in history?

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?