History Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.

John F. Kennedy

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

Agatha Christie

Rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving not only to survive, but to testify. The victims elect to become witnesses.

The name [Pop] sounds so awful. Dada must have something to do with Pop. it's so funny, the names are really synonyms. Does anyone know what they're supposed to mean or have to do with, those names? Johns and Rauschenberg, Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use, are now called progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential, and Merce Cunningham too, I think.... History books are being rewritten all the time.

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.

I found that they knew but little of the history of their race, and could be entertained by stories about their ancestors as readily as any way.

Henry David Thoreau

A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

Bertrand Russell

Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When I'm elected I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there's a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.... After a full and partial and long — really long overdue security assessment we will develop a responsible immigration policy that serves the interests and values of America.

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.

Henry David Thoreau

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

We celebrate this history, this heritage, as an immigrant nation. And we are strong enough to acknowledge, as painful as it may be, that we haven't always lived up to our own ideals. We haven't always lived up to these documents. [...] We succumbed to fear. We betrayed not only our fellow Americans, but our deepest values. We betrayed these documents. It's happened before. And the biggest irony of course was — is that those who betrayed these values were themselves the children of immigrants. How quickly we forget. One generation passes, two generation passes, and suddenly we don't remember where we came from. And we suggest that somehow there is us and there is them, not remembering we used to be them.

And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God... and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.

Abraham Lincoln

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

Henry David Thoreau

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time,
unobscured by the dust of history.

Rabindranath Tagore

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

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

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.

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

Upon this point, a page of history is worth a volume of logic.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.

Pope John Paul II

Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate — like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history — until it degenerates into fables.
Pelorat said, We historians are familiar with the process, Dom. There is a certain preference for the fable. The falsely dramatic drives out the truly dull.

Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me.