Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Failure is impossible.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

Follow me if I advance, kill me if I retreat, avenge me if I die.

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.

For four - fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pondscum.

For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

For more than half a century... this Union has stood unshaken. Whatever dangers may threaten it, I shall stand by it and maintain it in its integrity to the full extent of the obligations imposed and the powers conferred upon me by the Constitution.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

For what is history, but... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world ... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

Freedom is a system based on courage.

Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience (in this case, the judge or the jury) that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

From the theft of confidential cables to 21st century protest movements, to development breakthroughs that have the potential to change millions of lives, we are all in uncharted territory.

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.

Generally speaking, historically in this country, the care of a child has been thought of as female business.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

Good things don't come to those who wait. They come to those who agitate!

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.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

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.

Great Britain provided time; the United States provided money and Soviet Russia provided blood.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

Happy people have no history.

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

Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.

Here is a shared memory that we didn't share, forgot to share, for almost ninety years.

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

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.