History Quotes

"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business."
-Henry David Thoreau

"The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors."
-Voltaire

"Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes."
-Voltaire

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."
-Sir Winston Churchill

"From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned."
-George Orwell

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It's the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different."
-Oscar Wilde

"History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
-Napoleon Bonaparte

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we made today."
-Henry Ford

"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."
-Rudyard Kipling

"The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know."
-Harry S Truman

""The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes"."
-Adolf Hitler

"History is the great dust-heap... a pageant and not a philosophy."
-Augustine Birrell

"History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes."
-Paul Eldridge

"History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil."
-Bob Dole

"History is a romance that is believed; romance, a history that is not believed."
-Horace Walpole

"What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power."
-William Paley

"History is philosophy learned from examples."
-Dionysius

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity."
-Cicero

"Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule."
-Jefferson Davis

"For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum."
-J. W. Schopf

"History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions."
-Ted Koppel

"History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided."
-Konrad Adenauer

"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government."
-John Sharp Williams

"History is the short trudge from Adam to atom."
-Leonard Louis Levinson

"The vicissitudes of history, however, have not dissuaded them from their earnest search for a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, namely socialism."
-Richard John Neuhaus

"If history has ended, it has been stopped at remarkable cost to the average US citizen."
-Ben Manski

"History never looks like history when you are living through it."
-John W. Gardner