History - Quotes

A generation which ignores history has no past and no future. - Robert A. Heinlein

A good knowledge of things past is an armour against events to come. - Edward Counsel

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history. - Mahatma Gandhi

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. - Anne Bronte

All you have learned from history is old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing that history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow. Only what we must not do. - Edwin H. Land

Anyone can look for history in a museum. The creative explorer looks for history in a hardware store. - Robert Wieder

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past. - Lewis H. Lapham

Each day is a little bit of history. - Jose Saramago

Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries. - Richard Nixon

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. - Robert Kenny

Happy nations have no history. - Belgian Proverb

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well. - Frank Herbert

History ... is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. - Edward Gibbon

History allows us to see the obvious – but unfortunately, not until it is too late. - Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history – while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance – might make you sceptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth. - Howard Zinn

History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. - Charles de Gaulle

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? - Washington Irving

History gets reinterpreted as time goes on. Many times, the participants are lost in the retelling of the story. - Buzz Aldrin

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues. - T. S. Eliot

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. - Frank Herbert

History is a relay of revolutions. - Saul Alinsky

History is a vast dust-heap of falsehood with a few pennies of truth scattered through it. - Austin O’Malley

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books, books which glorify their own cause and disparage as the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said; “What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” - Unknown

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

History is full of surprises. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place. - Howard Zinn

History is mainly a record of wars, and it has bequeathed the sorry fact that still nations devote more money to armies and navies than they do to education or the arts. - James Platt

History is more or less bunk. - Henry Ford

History is not a suicide note – it is a record of our survival. - Jeanette Winterson

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends. - Karl Marx

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. - George Santayana

History is Philosophy teaching by example. - Unknown

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. - Walter Bagehot 

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. - Julian Barnes

History is the autobiography of a madman. - Alexander Herzen

History is the same thing over and over again. - Woody Allen

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided. - Konrad Adenauer

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

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity. - Cicero

History is written by the winners. - Alex Haley

History must repeat itself because we pay such little attention to it the first time. - Blackie Sherrod

History of mankind has been marked by progression and destruction. Everyone is duty bound to learn from the past and help shape the destiny of our future generations. - Unknown

History records the successes of men with objectives and a sense of direction. Oblivion is the position of small men overwhelmed by obstacles. - William H. Danforth

History repeats itself; historians repeat each other. - Phillip Guedala

History teaches us that man and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. - Abba Eban

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. - Thomas Henry Huxley

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again. - Maya Angelou

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume. - George Eliot

History, with scarcely an exception, ought to be rewritten. - Horace Mann

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline. - John Updike

History… is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. - Edward Gibbon

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it. - Dorothy Salisbury Davis

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience! - George Bernard Shaw

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. - H. G. Wells

If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over. - Isaac Asimov

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten. - Rudyard Kipling

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes; and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. - Michael Crichton

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. - Toni Morrison

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes. - Voltaire

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir. - Seamus Heaney

Just as the human memory is not a passive recorder but a tool in the construction of the self, so history has never been a simple record of the past, but a means of shaping peoples. - Arthur C. Clarke

Make history or be a part of it. - Phil Knight

Men are not the causers of history. History itself, by a pressure of events, causes men to resort to particular actions. - Tanith Lee

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. - Karl Marx

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations. - John Barth

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

No man is free of his own history. - Anita Brookner

No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate – like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history – until it degenerates into fables. - Isaac Asimov

Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you've got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight. - Malcolm X

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. - Plato

Some people make headlines while others make history. - Philip Elmer-DeWitt

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

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. - Aldous Huxley

The business of the historian is with the truth of things, but he is too much under temptation to make his history interesting, to be always able to reject a fine story. - Christian Nestell Bovee

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

The great historian is he that can distinguish what is done from what happens. - Ivan Panin

The historian's duty is to separate the true from the false, the certain from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice – their choice. - Dwight D. Eisenhower

The history of mankind is a romance, a mask, a tragedy, constructed upon the principles of POETICAL JUSTICE; it is a noble or royal hunt, in which what is sport to the few is death to the many, and in which the spectators halloo and encourage the strong to set upon the weak, and cry havoc in the chase, though they do not share in the spoil. - William Hazlitt

The history of the human race always has been, and most likely always will be, that of evolution and revolution. - Lewis F. Korns

The history of the world is but the biography of great men. - Thomas Carlyle

The men who make history have not time to write it. - Metternich

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. - Oscar Wilde

The only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. - Henry Ford

The phenomena of history should be so recorded as to aid the reader, and particularly the young reader, in discovering its philosophy, instead of being recorded as they have hitherto generally been, in such a way as to obliterate the better instincts of humanity. - Horace Mann

The tapestry of history is woven of many threads. - Jacqueline Carey

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice. - Mark Twain

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost. - M. Scott Peck

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering. - Theodore Roosevelt

There is properly no history; only biography. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it. - Unknown

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. - Haile Selassie

To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. - Cicero

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history. - Lord Acton

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. - Sir Winston Churchill

We cannot escape history. - Abraham Lincoln

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. - George Bernard Shaw

What dependence can I have on the alleged events of ancient history, when I find such difficulty in ascertaining the truth regarding a matter that has taken place only a few minutes ago, and almost in my own presence! - Sir Walter Raleigh

What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learnt anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. - George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history. - Jane Addams

What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end. - Jean Cocteau

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right. - Eugene V. Debs

You have to look at history as an evolution of society. - Jean Chretien