Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

It sounds funny to say, but we saw [Kate's wedding to Prince William] as just a family wedding. And actually, I didn't realize - perhaps - the scale of it until afterwards. We all took on the roles as any family would.

It's really hard for me to use the term 'history' in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I'd rather stick to the pluralness of 'histories' in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.

It's so damned humiliating.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

It takes all sorts to make a world - saints as well as soldiers.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

It was a needed instrument to spread abroad the truth of a new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and dreamed where to my propositions to society would lead me.

It was involuntary. They sank my boat.

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.

It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals; but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.

It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.

It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence.

I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?

I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

I want to be as though new-born, knowing nothing, absolutely nothing about Europe.

James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare-- but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history in trapped in them.

I would rather be assassinated than see a single star removed from the American flag.

I want to see you game, boys, I want to see you brave and manly, and I also want to see you gentle and tender.

I was always a friend of southern rights, but an enemy of southern wrongs.

I wouldn't attach too much importance to these student riots. I remember when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasionally.

Jews show so near an affinity to you... Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism?

Julian sincerely abhorred the system of oriental despotism which Diocletian, Constantine, and the patient habits of four score years, had established in the empire. A motive of superstition prevented the execution of the design which Julian had frequently meditated, of relieving his head from the weight of a costly diadem; but he absolutely refused the title of Dominus or Lord, a word which was grown so familiar to the ears of the Romans, that they no longer remembered its servile and humiliating origin.

Journalism is merely history's first draft.

Kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity of size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things - call them what you will - I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess.

Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

Knowledge Qf history frees us to be contemporary.

Language is the archives of history.

Language is our body and our breath, our world and our thought, our perception and even out unconscious.

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Let us remember that the times which future generations delight to recall are not those of ease and prosperity, but those of adversity bravely borne.

Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.

[L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

Let valour end my life!

Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.

Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone.

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

Libraries are not made, they grow.

Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.

Life is a loom, weaving illusion.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.

Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Lincoln would be just like me. He wouldn't know what the hell to do.