History Quotes

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

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

"History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it. -Lin"

"The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice."

"Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done."

"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

"I came, I saw, I conquered."

"Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World."

"I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it."

"History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities."

"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people."

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history."

"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition."

"History is a vast early warning system."

"Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast."

"Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder."

"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 make today."

"If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this."

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them."

"Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering."

"Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."

"Revolutions are the locomotives of history."

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French."

"Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!"

"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."

"Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft."

"When the rich think about the poor, they have poor ideas."

"History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man."

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

"History shows that there are no invincible armies."

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there."

"Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go."