History Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. "Don't bother us with politics," respond those who don't want to learn.

Richard Stallman

After all my years of playing soldiers, and then of reading History, I have almost a mania to be in the East, to see fighting, and to serve.

History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity.

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

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

By their victory, the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions and other units of the Fifth Amphibious Corps have made an accounting to their country which only history will be able to value fully. Among the Americans serving on Iwo island, uncommon valor was a common virtue.

Chester W. Nimitz

If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.

George Edward Woodberry

The real movement of history, it turns out, is fueled not by matter but by spirit, by the will to freedom.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

David McCullough

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

For the earliest period of the history of Israel, all that precedes the building of the temple, not a trace can be found of any sanctuary of exclusive legitimacy.

Julius Wellhausen

There has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers.

Human blunders, however, usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.

A. J. P. Taylor

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward disaster.

Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather.

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.