Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

Libraries are not made, they grow.

Life is a loom, weaving illusion.

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

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.

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.

Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.

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

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.

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

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.

Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature.

Mad, is he? Then I hope that he will bite some of my other generals!

Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

Memmius would only be useless to him for a short time, but that he would remain useless to himself and the Republic forever.

Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.

Materially we must strive to secure a broader economic opportunity for all men, so that each shall have a better chance to show the stuff of which he is made.

Men like M. de Talleyrand are like sharp instruments with which it is dangerous to play.

Men are very apt to run into extremes, hatred to England may carry come into an excess of Confidence in France... I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.

Memoirs are the backstairs of history.

Mona Lisa is the only beauty who went through history and retained her reputation.

Mom and Dad say I should make my life an example of the principles I believe in... But every time I do, they tell me to stop it.

Modern dynamical systems theory has a relatively short history. It begins with Poincare (of course)... [to whom] a global understanding of the gross behavior of all solutions of the system was more important than the local behavior of particular, analytically-precise solutions.

More and more, I tend to read history. I often find it more up to date than the daily newspapers.

More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted,but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.

Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

Most of our people have never had it so good.

My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial.

Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

Mr. Chamberlain loves the working man, he loves to see him work.

My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.

My ideal man is Benjamin Franklin-the figure in American history most worthy of emulation ... Franklin is my ideal of a whole man. ... Where are the life-size-or even pint-size-Benjamin Franklins of today?

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water.

Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost.

My people must be tried in all things, that they may be prepared to receive the glory that I have for them.

Nature in no case cometh short of art, for the arts are copiers of natural forms.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.

No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly.

Nine English traditions out of ten date from the latter half of the nineteenth century.

No generation can escape history.

No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.