History Quotes

"The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations"

Ambrose Bierce, Journalist

"The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"Assassination has never changed the history of the world"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"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, Philosopher

"Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads"

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Poet

"Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts"

Thor Heyerdahl, Explorer

"History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap"

Ronald Reagan, President

"I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents"

Pablo Picasso, Artist

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

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"History is written by the victors"

Winston Churchill, Statesman

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

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself"

Winston Churchill, Statesman

"The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart"

Franklin D. Roosevelt, President

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

George Santayana, Philosopher

"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man"

Henry David Thoreau, Author

"If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians"

Warren Buffett, Businessman

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

Martin Luther King Jr., Minister

"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"

Martin Luther King Jr., Minister

"Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another"

Richard M. Nixon, President

"The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles"

Karl Marx, Philosopher

"I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction"

Richard M. Nixon, President

"It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends"

Karl Marx, Philosopher

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

Karl Marx, Philosopher

"History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this"

Karl Marx, Philosopher

"Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included"

Karl Marx, Philosopher

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself"

Virginia Woolf, Author

"Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good"

Lyndon B. Johnson, President

"Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism"

Benito Mussolini, Politician

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful"

Leo Tolstoy, Novelist

"In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character"

P. J. O'Rourke, Journalist

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

"Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy"

Margaret Thatcher, Leader

"Things have never been more like the way they are today in history"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

"The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!"

Dwight D. Eisenhower, President

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

Henry James, Writer

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature"

Henry James, Writer

"In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility - I welcome it"

John F. Kennedy, President

"History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside"

John F. Kennedy, President

"You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era"

David Hockney, Artist

"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, Philosopher

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