Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

No generation can escape history.

No historian should be trusted implicitly.

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.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

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

No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.

None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.

No one would have doubted his ability to reign had he never been emperor.

No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.

No opinion can be trusted; even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.

No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.

No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.

No one understands that the First Amendment is only important if you are going to offend somebody. If you're not going to offend somebody, you don't need protection of the First Amendment.

Not all that is presented to us as history has really happened; and what really happened did not actually happen the way it is presented to us; moreover, what really happened is only a small part of all that happened. Everything in history remains uncertain, the largest events as well as the smallest occurrence.

Not a stone but has its history.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.

Nothing falsifies history more than logic.

Now, as God the maker play'd he taught the game to Nature whom he created in his image; taught her the selfsame game which he played to her.

Not only is history written by the winners, it is also made by them.

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child.

... not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.

Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.

Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

Now, there are roles which are capturing a vibrant moment in an older woman's life. There was a time when those interesting roles stopped at 28. A few years ago we would have been finished by our age.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

Of course, it has never paid much.

Of course Overlord did not fail. How could it? With some many fine young men and women from all corners of the earth all determined to do their best to free a world gone half mad.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.

Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.

Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.