Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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.

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

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 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 still feel-kind of temporary about myself.

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

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.

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.

I think it would be an excellent idea.

Italy is only a geographical expression.

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.

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

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.

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 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 magnificent, but it is not war.

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

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 as late as you think. It is merely early - in the age of the rebirth of individualism.

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

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 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 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 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 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.