History Quotes

"It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again"

Audre Lorde, Poet

"Our culture, language, history, and values are vital to uniting us as a nation"

Bobby Jindal, Politician

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

James A. Baldwin, Author

"I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all"

James A. Baldwin, Author

"American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it"

James A. Baldwin, Author

"As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics"

Hillary Clinton, Politician

"In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed"

Charles Darwin, Scientist

"History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it"

Theodor Adorno, Philosopher

"Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can't construct a doctrine of creation without taking account of the age of the universe and the evolutionary character of cosmic history"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler"

Franz Kafka, Novelist

"To those who have chosen the profession of medicine, a knowledge of chemistry, and of some branches of natural history, and, indeed, of several other departments of science, affords useful assistance"

Charles Babbage, Mathematician

"Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ's vineyard"

Pope John Paul II, Clergyman

"A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'"

William F. Buckley, Jr., Journalist

"Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it"

Pope John Paul II, Clergyman

"Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history"

Octavio Paz, Poet

"History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information"

Robert Smithson, Artist

"Art history is less explosive than the rest of history, so it sinks faster into the pulverized regions of time"

Robert Smithson, Artist

"The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise"

Erica Jong, Novelist

"If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography"

Mackenzie King, Statesman

"Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before"

Matt Groening, Cartoonist

"Just in general, any government throughout history hasn't really wanted its people to be educated, because then they couldn't control them as easily"

Maynard James Keenan, Musician

"I think people in general have neglected to learn about history"

Maynard James Keenan, Musician

"When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity"

Robert Anton Wilson, Writer

"The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense"

William J. Clinton, President

"Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history"

Robert Anton Wilson, Writer

"History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy"

Robert Smithson, Artist

"All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs"

Richard Le Gallienne, Poet

"It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk"

Rebecca West, Author

"The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories"

Spencer Bachus, Politician

"Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness"

Erica Jong, Novelist

"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it"

Simone Weil, Philosopher

"Live out of your imagination, not your history"

Stephen Covey, Businessman

"Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's"

Madame de Stael, Writer

"The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future"

Lord Acton, Historian

"I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history"

Antonio Tabucchi, Writer

"I want to write a book which is the history of comedy"

John Cleese, Actor

"History never looks like history when you are living through it"

John W. Gardner, Educator

"History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul"

Lord Acton, Historian

"And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that"

Lord Acton, Historian

"Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently"

Charles Dudley Warner, Journalist

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