Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

Eugenics was central to the entire Nazi enterprise, joined with romantic nativist and racist myths of the pure-bred Nordic. The emphasis on 'blood' called for a purifying of the nation's gene pool, so that Germans could regain the nobility and greatness of their genetically pure forebears.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

Every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.

Every day grows more amnesiac about its recent past.

Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality which is unendurable.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

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.

Every thought is an afterthought.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Failure is impossible.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

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

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.

For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

For more than half a century... this Union has stood unshaken. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.

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.

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.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

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.

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.