Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

The highest condition of art is artlessness.

The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

... the histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

The history of Napoleon now becomes, for 12 momentous years, the history of mankind.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.

The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

The history of all countries shows that the working class exclusively by its own effort is able to develop only trade-union consciousness.

The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.

The history of mankind is his character.

The historian amputates reality.

The history of all times, and of today especially, teaches that...women will be forgotten if they forget to think about themselves.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave.

[T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.

The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil.

[T]he historian and the detective have much in common.

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

The history of humanity is not the history of its wars, but the history of its households.

The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.

The history of the world is the history of the privileged few.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

The history of the world is none other than the progress of the , consciousness of freedom.

The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.

The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

The Japanese Co-Prosperity Zone began as a racist utopia and ended as a cross between an abbatoir, a plantation and a brothel.

The Japanese couldn't have been all bad during World War II. Look at all the movies Hollywood was able to make on account of them. The Indians weren't the only bad guys. Thanks to the Japanese and Geronimo, John Wayne became a millionaire.

The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.

The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.

The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these Germans; the enjoyment of it, their best treasure; the word that expressed that enjoyment the most pleasing to their ear. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained the honourable epithet of Franks or Freemen; which concealed, though it did not extinguish, the peculiar names of the several states of the confederacy.

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

The long historian of my country's woes.

The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?

The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past.

The manly pride of the Romans, content with substantial power, had left to the vanity of the East the forms and ceremonies of ostentatious greatness. But when they lost even the semblance of those virtues which were derived from their ancient freedom, the simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.

The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.

The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.

The midwife of history is violence.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.