Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

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 art is an instant arrested in eternity.

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 people have no history.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Historians are gossips who tease the dead

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

"Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Historical! Must it be historical to catch your attention? Even though historicity, like notoriety, denotes nothing more than thatsomething has occurred.

History at its best is vicarious experience.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

History: gossip well told.

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

History is an argument without end.

History is a pageant and not a philosophy.

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

History is but the polemics of the victor.

History is full of delightful reversals, where the opposite of what one predicts comes true.

History is full of surprises.

History is more or less bunk.

History is never above the melee. It is not allowed to be neutral, but forced to enlist in every army.

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.

History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.