Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.

For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

For more than half a century... this Union has stood unshaken. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world ... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

From the theft of confidential cables to 21st century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

God is the ruler of history. His times are well chosen The Roman Empire was an instrument in his hand. And so are the nations of the modern world.

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

Happy people have no history.

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years.

He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

His sumptuous tents, and those of his satraps, afforded an immense booty to the conqueror; and an incident is mentioned which proves the rustic but martial ignorance of the legions in the elegant superfluities of life. A bag of shining leather, filled with pearls, fell into the hands of a private soldier; he carefully preserved the bag, but he threw away its contents, judging that whatever was of no use could not possibly be of any value.

[H]istorians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead