Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?

In the United States those bits of our history that remain are paved over, sanitized, packaged for easy consumption. At those sites not already lost to commercial development, we walk between velvet ropes, herded by guides, warned not to touch. Our icons are preserved under glass, their magic demystified in glossy brochures.

Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

Is he a good man?" "Define 'good'.

Is not that state a warning and a judgment for our heavy sins as a nation?

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses.

I suppose this work is part of the devil that is in us all.

I still feel-kind of temporary about myself.

I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually. Everyone should learn that.

Italy is only a geographical expression.

It has been so written, for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

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.

It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

I think it would be an excellent idea.

It is almost inconceivable that citizens of that time were willing to support so bloody a war, by putting so high a price upon Union and Liberty.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

It is magnificent, but it is not war.

It is bad luck for world history that of all people the Russians adopted Communism, because they are totally unfit for it.

It is evil things that we will be fighting against-brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution-and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.

It is not as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.

It is incumbent on us diligently to remember that the kingdom of heaven was promised to the poor in spirit, and that minds afflicted by calamity and the contempt of mankind cheerfully listen to the divine promise of future happiness; while, on the contrary, the fortunate are satisfied with the possession of this world; and the wise abuse in doubt and dispute their vain superiority of reason and knowledge.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

It is proverbial, of course, that man never learns from history, and, as a rule, in respect to a problem of the present, it can teach us simply nothing. The new must be made through untrodden regions, without suppositions, and often, unfortunately, without piety also.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

It is past all controversy that what costs dearest is, and ought to be, most valued.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment

It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

It is the common calamity of old age to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable.

It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole.

It is undeniable that others and the larger world, so beleaguered at this moment in history, need everything that we have to give. But what to give is the problem. It seems finally clear that we cannot find out what to do simply by thinking about it. We need to gain our inspiration and our direction from much deeper sources.

It is well indeed for out land that we of this generation have learned to think nationally.

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

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

It is the winners who write history - their way.