History Quotes

I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?

Julie Burchill

Debate and divergence of views can only enrich our history and culture.

Ibrahim Babangida

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is an awful lot of difference between reading something and actually seeing it, for you can never tell, till you see it, just how big a liar History is.

Will Rogers

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

John W. Gardner

History is just the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

We are always doing, says he, something for posterity, but I would see posterity do something for us.

Joseph Addison

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

Henry Miller, Plexus, 1949

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

A blot in thy escutcheon to all futurity.

Miguel de Cervantes

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Miguel de Cervantes

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

Brian Eno

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

Lance Morrow

And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.

Julien Benda

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Henry A. Kissinger

Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.

Ken Kesey

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

Louis L'Amour

People don't always realize that my parents shared a sense of intellectual curiosity and a love of reading and of history.

Caroline Kennedy

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

Manuel Puig