History Quotes

“History is the grand master, and only by studying his game can the pupil learn and improve.

[Maria Florkowska]”
― Gabriella Saab, The Last Checkmate

“History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think they're taking part in a conspiracy, but it never works out the way they intended.”
― Adam Curtis

“Archaeological evidence suggests that the first, most ancient cities were built around temples,” Kier commented. “And then, around such religious centers, agriculture began, then trade, finance, crafts. The state appeared even later. This indirectly confirms your words. But it’s not that simple. People are not divided into good idealists and bad atheists. Many do not believe in the God but try to behave as if He exists. Some kind of existential schizophrenia. Such self-deception can last long, until meeting a real atheist.”
“A maniac always defeats a schizophrenic,” said Enrique.”
― Andrew Orange, The Outside Intervention

“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― Emma Southon, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome

“History is not ‘the use of information about the past for political purposes’, as the deceitful ‘scientists’ claim. History is the memory of the people of the past. About their beliefs, achievements, mistakes, and crimes. This is one of those abilities that distinguish us from animals.”
― Andrew Orange, The Outside Intervention

“I've lost over twenty friends [to AIDS]. I've seen a world vanish-a culture that has been oppressed in one generation, liberated in the nest, and wiped out in the next.”
― Edmund White

“There has been a revolution in our understanding over the last forty years, and the gains in knowledge are permanent. But we will never know everything, and that is as it should be. From the obscuring mist of the past, science has ensured that some of the mountains have emerged into clear view, but as soon as that happens the misty shadows of further peaks are glimpsed in the distance, rank upon rank: so many other heights to climb, so many mysteries to investigate.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“Your lives are so brief that hope is often short-lived among people. You forget your history when it’s unpleasant, yet you obstinately cling to outdated values and belief systems, because the only thing you fear more than facing the darkness of your past is confronting a future that’s unknown.”
― Romina Russell, Thirteen Rising

“You need to always remember the glory of the ancestors for it is your fuel that you’ll burn the enemies of the nation with.”
― King Thutmose the 3rd

“The truth which history has in store for us needs to surface someday. It cannot remain buried forever.”
― Niranjan Mudholkar, The Kingdom of God

“Nowadays anthropology is busy with the gathering of chips of stones and of long-forgotten and buried remnants, in order to reconstruct the history of human, physical and social development. Much more important than those remote periods and than the material world, is the history of our intellectual development, to gather all the chips of the human genius, scattered and buried under the ruins of old literatures, and hidden in the popular literature. The youth of the human mind and the poetical reflection of the surrounding world are embodied in these tales and legends.”
― Moses Gaster, Jewish Folk-Lore In The Middle Ages

“While Lee believed in slavery, he also profited from it far more than other army colonels. At the age of twenty-four, two years after graduating from West Point, Lee married Mary Custis, the only child of George Washington Parke Custis, the adopted son of George Washington. Custis earned his money through inheritance, and that inherited wealth derived from the work of enslaved labor. Enslaved labor created much of his wealth including the prestigious, Doric-columned Arlington House with its commanding view of the capital. Custis owned two other enslaved labor farms—Romancoke and White House.

A year after marrying Mary Custis, Lee inherited enslaved workers from his mother’s estate. During his many years in the army, Lee hired out those enslaved workers and pocketed the profit, creating wealth. By the time he wrote his only will as a U.S. Army officer in 1846 as he headed to fight in Mexico, he estimated his net worth at $40,000 in stocks, bonds, and property, including enslaved workers, or more than $1.3 million today.”
― Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause

“She and everyone else in the palace were afflicted by these maladies. This constant, inescapable physical suffering is the greatest difference between us and the ancients, even making allowance for the vast disparities of society, language, culture and circumstance, and it is certainly a chief obstacle when it comes to our understanding of their motivations. Perhaps if our outlook on life were shortened to twenty-five years, and if we lived in constant discomfort and anxiety over our very survival, we could know them better.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“The history of the world consists of a lot of wealthy assholes sleeping with each other and killing people”
― Elizabeth Sandifer, Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

“البته تاریخ همیشه نشان داده که لکه سفید بین سیاهی، سرنوشت شومی دارد”
― متین برتیمار (Matin Bertimar), سه حرف

“{H}istory records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are set down, those lies his keepers keep their power by." -- Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“{H}istory records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards. All things, it is said, are duly recorded--all things of importance, that is. But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are set down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“My father, an enlightened spirit, believed in man.
My grandfather, a fervent Hasid, believed in God.
The one taught me to speak, the other to sing.
Both loved stories.
And when I tell mine, I hear their voices.
Whispering from beyond the silenced storm, they are what links the survivor to their memory.”
― Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters

“When invaders invade with an intent to only
loot, they don't normally destroy the idols, but if the intent is also to
sabotage the culture of the land.”
― Sapan Saxena, The Tenth Riddle

“And then I realize that maybe not so much has changed as we all thought, that maybe the whole idea of progress is a paradox, a rocking horse that goes forward and back, forward and back, but stays in the same place, giving only the comforting illusion of motion.”
― Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa

“History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.”
― Richard Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History

“[Lucas] was most famous for his short, best-selling book on fossils, "Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World", in which he showed his gift for enlivening the driest science. Apologizing for using Latin scientific names, he wrote: 'The reader may perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said the discovery of all these strange animals did not surprise her so much as the fact that anyone should know their names when they were found.”
― Michael Capuzzo, Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916

“If one understood history's laws, then one could control history's chronology, wresting it away from capitalism, already intent on monopolizing time. We wake, work, eat, and sleep according to what the landlord, the owner, the banker, the politician, and the schoolmaster command, Man had said. We accept that our time belongs to them, when in truth our time belongs to us. Awaken, peasants, workers, colonized! Stir from your zones of occult instability and steal the gold watch of time from the paper tigers, running dogs, and fat cats of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism!”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“El oficio de escritor no es sólo contar una historia, sino arañar almas”
― Nuria Marcilla, De Madrid al cielo

“...this is just the history of science, my dear friend. This is how it goes. We could be on the verge of a breakthrough if past events are any indication. Look at how Galileo was persecuted by the Church for his radical views. Remember, it was that very persecution that led to the foundation of modern science.”
― Larry Fort, Still Standing

“Last night, I felt a depth of sadness that I haven't felt or allowed myself to feel in a while. I mourned for Mia, the loss of our friendship, and mostly for the loss of my history, the lost memory of who I once was.”
― Heather Dark, The Designer Wife

“We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different potions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen,- Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance-and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortieses exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few-not omitting even scaffolding-or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in-in such a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.”
― Abraham Lincoln, "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand,"

“And it's not the future their eyes see,
But history. It stretches
Like a dry road uphill before them.

They climb it.”
― Tracy K. Smith, Duende

“The uninterrupted victory of democracy, which to our revisionism as well as to bourgeois liberalism, appears as a great fundamental law of human history and, especially, modern history has shown upon closer examination to be a phantom. No absolute and general relation can be constructed between capitalist development and democracy. The political form of a given country is always the result of the composite of all the existing political factors, domestic as well as foreign. It admits within its limits all variations of the scale from absolute monarchy to the democratic republic.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution

“She did not want history to repeat itself. What she did not know was that sometimes, history had a way of crawling back into people’s life when they least expect it.”
― K.Hari Kumar, Dakhma