History Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country.

Thomas Jefferson

We are moving forward to greater freedom, to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

It being a remarkable fact in theatrical history, but one long since established beyond dispute, that it is a hopeless endeavor to attract people to a theatre unless they can be first brought to believe that they will never get in.

Charles Dickens

I tell the story of these philosophers in simplified form: I merely wish to bring out in each system that point which represents a piece of the personality, and which history must preserve as a part of what is irrefutable and indisputable.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thank you, Poland — thank you for your courage. Thank you for reminding the world that no matter how brutal the crackdown, no matter how long the night, the yearning for liberty and dignity does not fade away. It will never go away. Thank you, Poland, for your iron will and for showing that, yes, ordinary citizens can grab the reins of history, and that freedom will prevail — because, in the end, tanks and troops are no match for the force of our ideals.

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

Henry David Thoreau

History is replete with instances of men, who, by dying with courage and compassion on their lips converted the hearts of their violent opponents.

Truth, which is permanent, eludes the historian of events. Truth transcends history.

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

Geology, a science of forty or fifty summers, has had the effect to throw an air of novelty and mushroom speed over entire history... Geology itself is only chemistry with the element of time added.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

Friedrich Nietzsche

History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.

J. R. R. Tolkien

For us, forgetting was never an option. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

The Poet Language is the archives of history... Language is fossil poetry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

John F. Kennedy

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

As all those have shown who have discussed civil institutions, and as every history is full of examples, it is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity; and if such malignity is hidden for a time, it proceeds from the unknown reason that would not be known because the experience of the contrary had not been seen, but time, which is said to be the father of every truth, will cause it to be discovered.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to mature. A child under the age of fifteen should confine its attention either to subjects like mathematics, in which errors of judgment are impossible, or to subjects in which they are not very dangerous, like languages, natural science, history, etc.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Loves and Cupids took to flight afraid, and Martyrdom had no such torment in its painted history of suffering.

Charles Dickens

Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

Theodore Roosevelt

An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history - he is one who can accomplish things.

Look back at history - those who guided the revolution in the time of its culmination never kept their leading positions long after the turning point.

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.