Historical Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

Michael Rostovtzeff

The works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time.

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.

I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

Any science, at any moment of its historical existence, contains not only truth but also much that is half-truth, sham-truth, and plain error.

Pitirim Sorokin

I can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.

If a powerful and benevolent spirit has shaped the destiny of this world, we can better discover that destiny from the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world, than from historical records, or from speculation, wherein the heart withers.

William Butler Yeats

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

All that we may ever hope to establish in historical research are facts and conditions but never causes.

Otto E. Neugebauer

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Perhaps when you again appear in print you may choose to dedicate your volumes to Prince Leopold: any historical romance, illustrative of the history of the august House of Coburg, would just now be very interesting.

James Stanier Clarke

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

Elizabeth Bishop

Seminary also introduced me to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins. I learned from my professors and the readings they assigned that Jesus almost certainly was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his purpose as dying for the sins of the world... I also found the claim that Jesus and Christianity were the only way of salvation to be troublesome.

It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

Michel Foucault

The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.
NOBODY CARES

Christendom is not primarily a mental construct. It is above all a fact, indeed the longest historical experience the Church has had. Hence the deep impact it has made on its life and thought.

Gustavo Gutiérrez

... I suspect people would be in for a real shock if they knew the depths of [Obama's] historical ignorance.

Charles Foster Johnson

Disneyworld…is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.

I do not propose to argue the case for evolution, which I regard as being quite as well proven as most other historical facts, but to discuss its possible causes, which are certainly debatable.

J. B. S. Haldane

Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis

Chandra Talpade Mohanty

While the geneticists were disproving many of Darwin's ideas, the palaeontologists were determining the actual historical facts of evolution.... they were able to verify the law of succession, first explicitly given by Darwin's colleague Wallace. "Every species has come into existence coincident, both in time and space, with a pre-existing closely allied species."

J. B. S. Haldane

The analysis of the Aristotelian theory of life must therefore be one of the corner-stones of any historical works on biology.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ.