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“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”
Bertrand Russell
“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.”
Francis Bacon
“I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.”
Steven Spielberg
“Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”
Carl Sagan
“Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“History shows that there are no invincible armies.”
Joseph Stalin
“Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.”
Albert Schweitzer
“In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.”
Desmond Tutu
“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
Virginia Woolf
“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
Virginia Woolf
“Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”
Walt Whitman
“In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.”
Alan Watts
“There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.”
Ansel Adams
“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”
Edmund Burke
“History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”
Ambrose Bierce
“The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Live out of your imagination, not your history.”
Stephen Covey
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Marcus Garvey
“History develops, art stands still.”
Edward Morgan Forster
“History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”
Malcolm X
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
Alexander Pope
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
