History famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
-
It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.
-- A. A. Gill -
Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.
-- A. A. Gill -
If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
-- A. A. Milne -
I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity. I know you'd better focus on the good stuff or you're screwed.
-- A. J. Jacobs -
Rather an end in horror, than horror without end. He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later. The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to. The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,Does this improve me?, not look at the possible fringe benefits If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is not a catalogue but...a convincing version of events.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is the great propagator of doubt.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
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.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
-- A. L. Rowse -
History does not eliminate grievances. It lays them down like landmines.
-- A. N. Wilson -
It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
-- A. N. Wilson -
We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
-- A. N. Wilson -
Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.
-- A. O. Scott -
The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
-- A. Whitney Brown -
History is not history unless it is the truth.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan -
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.
-- Adam Garfinkle -
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.
-- Adolf Hitler -
We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.
-- Adolf von Harnack -
war with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world ... An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes - and panoply is an apt term here, because it is the ancient Greek word for 'all weapons.
-- Adrienne Mayor -
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
-- Adrienne Rich -
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.
-- Adrienne Rich -
If history in the making be a fluid thing, it swiftly crystallizes.
-- Agnes Repplier -
History is, and has always been trameled by facts. It may ignore some and deny others; but it cannot accommodate itself unreservedly to theories; it cannot be stripped of things evidenced in favor of things surmised.
-- Agnes Repplier -
The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.
-- Agnes Repplier -
History is not written in the interests of morality.
-- Agnes Repplier -
This American system of ours,call it Americanism,call it capitalism,call it what you will,gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and make the most of it.
-- Al Capone -
We need a war every 10 years, so we can stay match fit in case the Germans try again.
-- Al Murray -
History, in a democratic age, tends to become a series of popular apologies, and is inclined to assume that the people can do no wrong.
-- Albert Pollard -
Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
-- Albert Camus -
Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
-- Albert Camus -
History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
-- Albert Camus -
The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.
-- Albert Camus -
If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
-- Albert Camus -
History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
-- Albert Camus -
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Death is the only thing we haven't succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
-- Aldous Huxley -
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.
-- Aldous Huxley -
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.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.
-- Aldous Huxley -
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
-- Aleister Crowley -
A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers.
-- Alexander Smith -
On their side more men are standing, on ours more will fight!
-- Alexander the Great -
When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville -
I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
-- Alfred Hitchcock -
History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.
-- Alfred Kazin -
The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
History is the sextant of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position.
-- Allan Nevins -
A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.
-- Allen Johnson -
History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
History teaches everything, even the future.
-- Alphonse de Lamartine -
No matter what accomplishments you make, somebody helped you.
-- Althea Gibson -
We learned the value of research in World War II.
-- Amar Bose -
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.
-- Ambrose Bierce -
It was a needed instrument to spread abroad the truth of a new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and dreamed where to my propositions to society would lead me,
-- Amelia Bloomer -
Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.
-- Amelia Earhart -
Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.
-- Anais Nin -
When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.
-- Anatole France -
Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
-- Andre Suares -
History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
-- Andrew Marr -
With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
-- Andrew Roberts -
What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.
-- Andrew Roberts -
Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.
-- Anna Komnene -
It takes all sorts to make a world - saints as well as soldiers.
-- Anthony Anderson -
Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
History is only time furnished with dates and rich with events.
-- Antoine Rivarol -
No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth.
-- Anton Walbrook -
History is a big word..........History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.
-- Antonio Tabucchi -
Russians can give you arms but only the United States can give you a solution.
-- Anwar Sadat -
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
-- Aristotle -
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
-- Aristotle -
If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development
-- Aristotle -
History is a vision of God's creation on the move.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee -
When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.
-- Arthur Koestler -
Honest history is the weapon of freedom.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
The passion for tidiness is the historian's occupational disease.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
History is, indeed, an argument without end.
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -
I still feel-kind of temporary about myself.
-- Arthur Miller -
History has now been for the first time systematically considered, and has been found, like other phenomena, subject to invariable laws.
-- Auguste Comte -
I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.
-- Augustine Birrell -
History is a pageant and not a philosophy.
-- Augustine Birrell -
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.
-- Augustus William Hare -
When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.
-- Augustus William Hare -
The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.
-- Augustus William Hare -
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.
-- Ayn Rand -
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart -
The trouble with American History is that you don't remember it, and why should you? Nobody does.
-- Barbara Holland
