Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.

Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, blood, even assassination should so condense - perhaps only really lastingly condense - a Nationality.

Strange are the ways of history, where no single thing abides, but all things flow into each other, fragment to fragment clinging.

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded; but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.

Summation of Leviathan: "The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

Take from the altars of the past the fire - not the ashes.

Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.

Tell the FBI that the kidnappers should pick out a judge that Nixon wants back.

Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts, and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries, of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty, that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.

That great dust-heap called 'history'.

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.

Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

That public virtue which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Such a sentiment, which had rendered the legions of the republic almost invincible, could make but a very feeble impression on the mercenary servants of a despotic prince; and it became necessary to supply that defect by other motives, of a different, but not less forcible nature; honour and religion.

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

The active cavalry of Scythia is always followed, in their most distant and rapid incursions, by an adequate number of spare horses, who may be occasionally used, either to redouble the speed, or to satisfy the hunger, of the barbarians. Many are the resources of courage and poverty.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

The authors of all our misfortune.

The barbarians of Germany had felt, and still dreaded, the arms of the young Caesar; his soldiers were the companions of his victory; the grateful provincials enjoyed the blessings of his reign; but the favourites, who had opposed his elevation, were offended by his virtues; and they justly considered the friend of the people as the enemy of the court.

The Battle of Koom Valley is the only one known to history where both sides ambushed each other.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

The best benefit we derive from history is the enthusiasm it excites.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

The British government had not engaged in any serious actual oppression of the colonies before 1774, but it had claimed powers not granted by the governed, powers that made oppression possible, powers that it began to exercise in 1774 in response to colonial denial of them. The Revolution came about not to overthrow tyranny, but to prevent it.

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don't ask for their love; only for their fear.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

The ceding of Alsace-Lorraine is nothing but war in perpetuity under the mask of peace.

The challenge of history is to recover the past and introduce it to the present.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

The brutal soldiers satisfied their sensual appetites without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their female captives; and a nice question of casuistry was seriously agitated, Whether those tender victims, who had inflexibly refused their consent to the violation which they sustained, had lost, by their misfortune, the glorious crown of virginity. There were other losses indeed of a more substantial kind and more general concern.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

The clock indicates the moment-but what does eternity indicate?

The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.

The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.