Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and - until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself - an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

by operating on the principle of human and material obsolescence, America eats her history alive.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

Certainly I shall use the police, and most ruthlessly, whenever the German people are hurt. But I refuse the notion that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. No, the police protect whoever comes into Germany legitimately, but it does not exist for the purpose of protecting Jewish money-lenders.

Change is scientific; progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

Charles was constitutionally incapable of being a constitutional monarch.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Compare the scale and magnifcence of Versailles with St James's - the brick-built hovel in which the 18th-century kings of England lived. What was then the most powerful monarchy in the world housed its sovereigns in a converted leper hospital, yet, at the same time, parliament provided the magnificent palaces of Chelsea and Greenwich as hospitals for retired soldiers and sailors.

Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

Comfort is the only thing our civilization can give us.

Completeness is rare in history.

Conservation means development as much as it does protection. A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can.

Continue to instruct the world; and - whilst we carry on a poor unequal conflict with the passions and prejudices of our day, perhaps with no better weapons than other passions and prejudices of our own - convey wisdom to future generations.

Conventional history completely ignores half the human race.

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty, was successfully practised; honours, gifts, and immunities were offered and accepted as the price of an episcopal vote; and the condemnation of the Alexandrian primate was artfully represented as the only measure which could restore the peace and union of the catholic church.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

Crassus was in the habit of maintaining that nobody should be called rich who was not able to maintain an army on his income.

Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

Crown Prince Rupprecht, the heir to the throne of Bavaria who commanded the army group facing the British at the Somme, was the senior direct lineal heir of James Stuart, the Old Pretender of 1715. Had there been any Jacobites left in Britain in 1916, they would have had to regard this south German prince as their rightful king.

Dad, I'm in some trouble. There's been an accident and you're going to hear all sorts of things about me from now on. Terrible things.

Darkest of all Decembers ever has my life known, Sitting here by the embers, stunned, helpless, alone.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.

Deliberation is a function of the many; action is the function of one.

Death is nothing to us: for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.

Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

Despise Your enemy stragetically, but take him seriously tactically

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

Don't assume you have to be extraordinary to be used by God. You don't have to have exceptional gifts, talents, abilities, or connections. God specializes in using ordinary people whose limitations and weaknesses make them ideal showcases for His greatness and glory.

Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long...which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.

Discontent is the seed of ethics.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Each of us is accountable to God for our personal holiness. Humbling yourself by letting others into your life and allowing them to help you and hold you accountable will release the sanctifying, transforming grace of God in your life.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

During the games of the Circus, he had, imprudently or designedly, performed the manumission of a slave in the presence of the consul. The moment he was reminded that he had trespassed on the jurisdiction of another magistrate, he condemned himself to pay a fine of ten pounds of gold, and embraced this public occasion of declaring to the world that he was subject, like the rest of his fellow-citizens, to the laws, and even to the forms, of the republic.

Do what you will this life's a fiction, And is made up of contradiction.

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

Emancipation is the demand of civilization. That is a principle; everything else is an intrigue.

Egyptologists, skilled in piecing together the papyri of lost civilisations, suddenly discovered that the same talent could be applied to working out the pattern of German radio traffic.

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It's just the universe breathing.

England and Ireland may flourish together. The world is large enough for both of us. Let it be our care not to make ourselves too little for it.

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himselfremained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat.

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.