Actions Quotes Logo

History Quotes

I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteen...

Show More

Is it your implication that no good will come of this expedition?’‘Oh it will, sir; there’s no denyi...

Show More

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard bef...

Show More

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All obje...

Show More
Picture of Amy Tan
Amy TanThe Bonesetter's Daughter

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

We were meant to survive because of our minds' ability to reason, our ability to live with frustrati...

Show More

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Mrs. Palin is history in a dress. And her script is straight out of Hollywood - like those teen movi...

Show More

George W. Bush is history's president, a man for whom the long-term success or failure of democracy ...

Show More

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

For most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country.

Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.

Picture of Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere SmithLetters to a Young Artist

We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to h...

Show More

Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of I...

Show More

'Easter' is a movable event, calculated by the relative positions of sun and moon, an impossible way...

Show More

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It ...

Show More

A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, firs...

Show More

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have chan...

Show More

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving th...

Show More

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond sc...

Show More

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal h...

Show More

Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, ...

Show More

Sometimes I hear the world discussed as the realm of men. This is not my experience. I have watched ...

Show More
A
Antonella Gambotto-BurkeThe Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide

A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.

Picture of Antonin Scalia
Antonin ScaliaScalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court's Wittiest

The principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philoso...

Show More
Picture of Antonio Gramsci
Antonio GramsciSelections from the Prison Notebooks

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements a...

Show More

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war ...

Show More

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unnering flows towards her goal. History know...

Show More

Each wrong idea we follow is a crime committed against future generations.

Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.

Picture of Arthur Koestler
Arthur KoestlerThe Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Wh...

Show More

To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And lo...

Show More
Picture of Arundhati Roy
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things

How history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.

Picture of Arundhati Roy
Arundhati RoyThe God of Small Things

The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books a...

Show More

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

Picture of Arundhati Roy
Arundhati RoyThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness

History is really a study of the future, not the past.

Picture of Arundhati Roy
Arundhati RoyThings That Can and Cannot Be Said

No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you y...

Show More

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude t...

Show More

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

Have I have played my part well in the comedy of life? If so, clap your hands and dismiss me from th...

Show More

If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.

At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of whi...

Show More
Picture of Augustus
AugustusRes Gestae Divi Augusti

But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to t...

Show More

Throughout human history, in any great endeavour requiring the common effort of many nations and men...

Show More

Europe and Africa share proximity and history, ideas and ideals, trade and technology. You are tied ...

Show More

We've persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people - a belief that out of the ashes...

Show More

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.

Picture of Barack Obama
Barack ObamaDreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits...

Show More

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched...

Show More

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard ...

Show More

To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan's book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times ...

Show More

The problem then with Jesus is that he cannot be removed from his time and transplanted into our own...

Show More
Picture of Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. EhrmanDid Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

On the latter point, it was sometimes noted that Christians gathered together under the cloak of dar...

Show More
Picture of Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. EhrmanMisquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're ...

Show More

Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience.

I believe that democracies do not go to war; that's the lesson of history, and I think that a democr...

Show More

Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.

If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.

I'd rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised.

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few t...

Show More
Picture of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin FranklinThe Life and Letters of Benjamin Franklin

In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when they are about t...

Show More

They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for...

Show More

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who,...

Show More

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and histo...

Show More

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a...

Show More

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearmen...

Show More

The war which is comingIs not the first one. There wereOther wars before it.When the last one came t...

Show More

If we could learn to look instead of gawking,We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,If only we co...

Show More
Picture of Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt BrechtThe Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been bel...

Show More
Picture of Bertrand Russell
Bertrand RussellAn Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: A Hilarious Catalogue of Organized and Individual Stupidity

A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making h...

Show More

There is something less than fully human in those who have never known a commitment to an idea, who ...

Show More

The unpleasant image of the feminists today resembles less the feminists themselves than the image f...

Show More

Woman's sexual problems are, in this sense, by-products of the suppression of her basic need to grow...

Show More

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, peo...

Show More

As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and des...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonA Short History of Nearly Everything

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, t...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonA Short History of Nearly Everything

Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilli...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonAt Home: A Short History of Private Life

Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventual...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonAt Home: A Short History of Private Life

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many ...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonAt Home: A Short History of Private Life

It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectl...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonAt Home: A Short History of Private Life

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonMade in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates mi...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonMade in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From ...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonMade in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It to...

Show More

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one do...

Show More
Picture of Bill Bryson
Bill BrysonShakespeare: The World as Stage

Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex c...

Show More
Picture of Bill Maher
Bill MaherWhen You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefo...

Show More

History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has or...

Show More
Picture of Bill Watterson
Bill WattersonHomicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

History is going somewhere. And we know full well that He who does all things well will bring beauty...

Show More

History is going somewhere. And we know full well that He who does all things well will bring beauty...

Show More

History is going somewhere. And we know full well that He who does all things well will bring beauty...

Show More

History is going somewhere. And we know full well that He who does all things well will bring beauty...

Show More