history quotes

“History is more or less bunk.”

“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.”

“History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”

“History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?”

— Lois McMaster Bujold

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

— Woody Allen

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

— Herbert George Wells

“Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.”

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself. ”

— Winston Churchill

“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. ”

— Winston Churchill

“History is written by the victors. ”

— Winston Churchill

“The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.”

— Franklin Roosevelt

“No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.”

— Dean Acheson

“When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.”

— Arthur Hailey

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. ”

— Stephen Hawking

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. ”

“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included. ”

“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this. ”

“It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends. ”

“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles. ”

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”

“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it. ”

“Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.”

— Honore de Balzac

“All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. ”

— Honore de Balzac

“All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing. ”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”

— Aldous Huxley

“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”

— Aldous Huxley

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