Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

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.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

From the theft of confidential cables to 21st century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world.

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

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

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

Happy people have no history.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years.

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

His sumptuous tents, and those of his satraps, afforded an immense booty to the conqueror; and an incident is mentioned which proves the rustic but martial ignorance of the legions in the elegant superfluities of life. A bag of shining leather, filled with pearls, fell into the hands of a private soldier; he carefully preserved the bag, but he threw away its contents, judging that whatever was of no use could not possibly be of any value.

He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

"Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible.

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

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

History at its best is vicarious experience.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

History: gossip well told.

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.