History Quotes

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera

“You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker”
― Malcom X

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

“When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.”
― Uchiha Madara

“Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.”
― Kiera Cass, The Elite

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”
― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

“The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!”
― Albert Einstein

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi: An Autobiography

“History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works

“The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.”
― Lemony Snicket

“I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”
― John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“History is written by the victors.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“You are not a victim. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You may have been challenged, hurt, betrayed, beaten, and discouraged, but nothing has defeated you. You are still here! You have been delayed but not denied. You are not a victim, you are a victor. You have a history of victory.”
― Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

“Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“Looking over the Ethan's bowed head, amidst the tangled forest of Wilderness littered with the bodies of men dead and dying, Victor saw the serene image of his mother.  She smiled at her son, her unbound black hair blowing wildly in the breeze.  She reached a hand out towards him, and this time, he went with her.”
― Barbara Sontheimer, Victor's Blessing

“History is written by the winners.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte