Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
History Quotes
500+ Sourced quotes
Source
Report...
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.
Henry David Thoreau
Source
Report...
Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.
Malcolm X
Source
Report...
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
Henry David Thoreau
Source
Report...
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
G. K. Chesterton
Source
Report...
In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.
Barack Obama
Source
Report...
The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
G. K. Chesterton
Source
Report...
You are a small exclamation mark at the end of a very long and insignificant sentence in the book of history.
Winston Churchill
Source
Report...
The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Source
Report...
Give the villagers village arithmetic, village geography, village history and the literary knowledge that they must use daily, i.e. reading and writing letters, etc.
Mahatma Gandhi
Source
Report...
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
George Orwell
Source
Report...
All history is the decline of war, though the slow decline. All that society has yet gained is mitigation; the doctrine of the right of war still remains.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
It is not the kings and generals that make history, but the masses of the people.
Nelson Mandela
Source
Report...
History will also afford frequent opportunities of showing the necessity of a public religion, from its usefulness to the public; the advantage of a religious character among private persons; the mischiefs of superstition, and the excellency of the Christian religion above all others, ancient or modern.
Benjamin Franklin
Source
Report...
We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition.
Henry David Thoreau
Source
Report...
In the teaching of geography and history a sympathetic understanding (should) be fostered for the characteristics of the different peoples of the world, especially for those who we are in the habit of describing as "primitive.
Albert Einstein
Source
Report...
There is nothing in history to parallel the influence of Jesus Christ.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
A museum of natural history always seems to me like the tombs of Egyptian kings, in which various sorts of beasts and plants are preserved in mummified rigidity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Source
Report...
I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Source
Report...
The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Source
Report...
At most, recognizing that our history was inspired by many tales we now recognize as false should make us alert, ready to call to constantly into question the very tale we believe true, because the criterion of the wisdom of the community is based on constant awareness of the fallibility of our learning.
Umberto Eco
Source
Report...
History shows that wars are divided into two kinds-just and unjust. All wars that are progressive are just, and all wars that impede progress are unjust.
Mao Zedong
Source
Report...
If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from, then you wouldn't have to ask me, who the heck do I think I am.
Bob Marley
Source
Report...
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.
Leon Trotsky
Source
Report...
The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out differently; they are more original, more peculiar, more varied than anyone could have expected.
Vladimir Lenin
Source
Report...
History is replete with instances of men, who, by dying with courage and compassion on their lips converted the hearts of their violent opponents.
Mahatma Gandhi
1
...
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes