Quotes
Quotes about History
History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.
Kind messages, that pass from land to land; Kind letters, that betray the heart's deep history, In which we feel the pressure of a hand,-- One touch of fire,--and all the rest is mystery!
The greatest man in history was the poorest.
The very ink in which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.
This solemn moment of triumph, one of the greatest moments in the history of the world . . . this great hour which rings in a new era . . . and which is going to lift up humanity to a higher plane of existence for all the ages of the future.
There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased, The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.
The three-legged stool of understanding is held up by history, languages, and mathematics. Equipped with these three you can learn anything you want to learn. But if you lack any one of them you are just another ignorant peasant with dung on your boots.
Quite often in history action has been the echo of words. An era of talk was followed by an era of events. The new barbarism of the twentieth century is the echo of words bandied about by brilliant speakers and writers in the second half of the nineteenth.
The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.
Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
There is no reason to repeat bad history.
Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.
The liberality of sentiment toward each other, which marks every political and religious denomination of men in this country, stands unparalleled in the history of nations.
At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history.
Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.
The history of every individual man should be a Bible.
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth. -A Midsummer Night's Dream. Act i. Sc. 1.
