History Quotes

“In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”
― Barack Obama

“The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”
― Frederic Bastiat

“One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.”
― Golda Meir, My Life

“Do you know the song Violet Crowned Athens?” he asked. Yellow hair like hers was rare among the Greeks. Though some people say that Helen of Troy . . .”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
― H.G. Wells

“There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.”
― Stephen Colbert

“Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.”
― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.”
― Edward Said

“To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."

[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]”
― David McCullough

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
― George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One

“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.”
― Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty

“Do you think we can be friends?” I asked.
He stared up at the ceiling. “Probably not, but we can pretend.”
― Priya Ardis, Ever My Merlin

“The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!”
― Harvey Milk

“I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back. (#92 ff.)”
― Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again: More Than 700 Jokes, Limericks and Anecdotes

“She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
― Thomas Paine

“I just don't see why the past has to matter.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.”
― Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

“All stories are made of both truths and lies, [...] What matters is the way that we believe in them.”
― Stephanie Garber, Once Upon a Broken Heart

“History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.”
― Bill Watterson, Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat

“Then, in an unusual moment, she grew emotional, which left little doubt about the level of profound respect and admiration Merkel had for her American colleague:
‘So eight years are coming to a close.  This is the last visit of (President) Barack Obama to our country…I am very glad that he chose Germany as one of the stopovers on this trip…Thank you for the reliable friendship and partnership you demonstrated in very difficult hours of our relationship. So let me again pay tribute to what we’ve been able to achieve, to what we discussed, to what we were able to bring about in difficult hours.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.”
― Terry Pratchett, Mort

“How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).”
― Karl Marx , Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence 1844-1877

“Vane grabbed me. “DuLac, let’s chat.”
Chat. British-speak for “Stand still while I yell at you.”
― Priya Ardis, My Merlin Awakening