History Quotes

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

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

History is written by the victors.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.

Debate and divergence of views can only enrich our history and culture.

Informed by our sad experience of history, we require nothing short of a foundation for lasting democracy.

The history of our country is not the history of any other country in the world which is either practicing advanced democracy or struggling to lay the foundation for democracy.

To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance.

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.

After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.

The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

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.

Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

This is what happens, when, for the first time in modern history, a candidate resorts to lawsuits to try to overturn the outcome of an election for president.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

The impact of the magazine was very strong. As I said, it portrayed dinosaurs as part of the geological history, part of the story of life on earth. It struck that paleontology was the career for me.

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

All I know is that history repeats itself and people are going to want to experience the world. But I know then they are going to have a better appreciation for what is here in Maine.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time.

There's probably more history now preserved underwater than in all the museums of the world combined. And there's no law governing that history. It's finders keepers.

Where I live in Connecticut was ice a mile above my house, all the way back to the North Pole, about 15 million kilometers, that's a big ice cube. But then it started to melt. We're talking about the floods of our living history.

I come back to the same thing: We've got the greatest pipeline in the company's history in the next 12 months, and we've had the most amazing financial results possible over the last five years, and we're predicting being back at double-digit revenue growth in fiscal year '06.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

I came, I saw, I conquered.

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We should not blur the lines between legal and illegal immigrants. Millions of people around the world have gone through the process to come here legally and they followed the rules that required them to pay a fee, learn English, and learn about American history and government.

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.

After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.

From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

I'm always going to get more of a charge playing Chicago than I will Duluth or some place like that. Just because of the history and the people there are way more knowledgeable than a lot of other cities. It's an amazing music scene with some great bands and great musicians.

History does not always repeat itself.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

One individual can begin a movement that turns the tide of history. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, Mohandas Ganhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa are examples of people standing up with courage and non-violence to bring about needed changes.

I mean, look, Nancy Pelosi said in the very beginning this is going to be the most open, honest and ethical Congress in history. And what we're seeing is she's breaking that promise every day.

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

The truth is the Republican leadership has created a credit card Congress that is recklessly selling out the future of America, our children and our grandchildren, and President Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible President in the history of America.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.