Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased; and not impaired in value.

The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and volkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s... The Nazis owed their spectacular to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organisation and strategy; and secondly, the wider socio-economic conditions which created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey.

The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith.

The object of studying philosophy is to know one's own mind, not other peoples.

The obscurest epoch is to-day.

The obvious is always least understood.

The older I get the more I'm convinced that it's the purpose of politicians and journalists to say the world is very simple, whereas it's the purpose of historians to say, 'No! It's very complicated.' The job of the historian is to help give people a sense of existence in time, without which we are really not fully human.

The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.

The only important thing to realise about history is that it all took place in the last five minutes.

The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history. In novels they are detestable.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

The only good histories are those written by those who had command in the events they describe.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.

The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.

The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

The past has always been the handmaid of authority.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

The past history of our globe must be explained by what can be seen to be happening now. No powers are to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

The philosopher, who with calm suspicion examines the dreams and omens, the miracles and prodigies, of profane or even of ecclesiastical history, will probably conclude that, if the eyes of the spectators have sometimes been deceived by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more frequently been insulted by fiction.

The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

The Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed is longer; and it is more accurately retained the less the mode of life of the recent forms differs from that of the earlier, and the less the peculiarities of the several embryonic states must be regarded as transferred from a later to an earlier period of life, or as acquired independently.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.

There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.

There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

The Reichswirtschaftsministerium ('Reich Ministry of Economic Affairs') tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham.

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.

There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.

There is little doubt that, until 1846 when he helped to engineer the resignation of Robert Peel, Disraeli was driven by an ambition to make his mark rather than by any consistent political purpose, and that his attacks on Peel would have not have been so mounted had he been given in 1841 the office for which he had asked.

There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.