Quotations: History

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

History is her story, too.
Anon

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

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.
Thomas Carlyle

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.
John Le Carré

History never repeats itself ,as most people fear. People usually repeat history.
Divine Chikobvu

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

History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.
Winston Churchill

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 a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins

History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
Clarence Darrow

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant

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

I don't know much about history, and I wouldn't give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
Henry Ford

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we made today.
Henry Ford

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
James A. Forude

I am responsible only to God and history.
Francisco Franco

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.
James A. Garfield

Cisco cleverly sold software that plugged into the wall, had a fan and got warm. People had a long history of buying things that plugged into the wall, made noises and got warm.
Ralph Gorin

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
George Wilhelm F. Hegel

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government.
Thomas Jefferson

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

About the capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether we (Soviet Union) exist. If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it our not, history is on our side. We will bury you.
Nikita Khrushchev

History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.
Leonard Louis Levinson

History is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through to avoid.
Livy

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization; the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.
Henry Miller

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.
Moliere

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

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
Jawaharlal Nehru

History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
George Orwell

History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity.
Dexter Perkins

Just because history is written by the victor does not necessarily mean that it is false. Therefore, revisionist history should always be suspect. Better still, all history should be suspect.
Colonel Brian D. Perry

People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.
Dan Quayle

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history - with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratliffe

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
Bertrand Russell

History, insofar as it accustoms human beings to comprehend the whole of the past and to hasten forward with its conclusions into the far future, conceals the boundaries of birth and death, which enclose the life of the human being so narrowly and oppressively, and with a kind of optical illusion, expands his short existence into endless space, leading the individual imperceptibly over into humanity.
Friedrich von Schiller

For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum.
J. W. Schopf

For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.
William Shakespeare

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard Shaw

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
Hunter S. Thompson

History is a novel for which the people is the author.
Alfred de Vigny

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