Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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 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 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 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 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 is always a rebuke to the present.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... 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.

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

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

The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

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

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 easy way from the earth to the stars.

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 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 no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

There is properly no history, only biography.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

There is only one way of victory over the bitterness and rage that comes naturally to us--To will what God wills brings peace.

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.

The repeated claim before the 'seizure of power' - that the NSDAP, as a national social-revolutionary movement, and not simply another political party... would create new bonds of unity through its elimination and transcending of the party system, was highly attractive and conveyed much of Nazism's dynamic appeal.

There never was a time in our history when ignorance of current affairs could be so dangerous.

There's no one as transparent as the person who thinks he's devilish deep.

The researcher is more memorable than the researched.

The retirement of Athanasius, which ended only with the life of Constantius, was spent, for the most part, in the society of the monks, who faithfully served him as guards, as secretaries, and as messengers; but the importance of maintaining a more intimate connection with the catholic party tempted him, whenever the diligence of the pursuit was abated, to emerge from the desert, to introduce himself into Alexandria, and to trust his person to the discretion of his friends and adherents.

The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.