Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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

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

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

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 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 winners who write history - their way.

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

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

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

It must now atone in blood for its complicity in wickedness.

It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.

It seems very strange ... that in the course of the world's history so obvious an improvement should never have been adopted. ... The next generation of Britishers would be the better for having had this extra hour of daylight in their childhood.

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 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 so damned humiliating.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

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

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

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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

Journalism is merely history's first draft.

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

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.

Language is the archives of history.

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

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

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.

Knowledge Qf history frees us to be contemporary.

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

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.

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.