History Quotes

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

What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again... Ecclesiastes 1:9

Bible

Last Halloween a kid tried to rip my face off. He thought it was a mask. Now it's different when I open the door the kids hand me candy.

Rodney Dangerfield

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

Rudyard Kipling

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

Woodrow Wilson

We have nothing in our history or position to invite aggression we have everything to beckon us to the cultivation of relations of peace and amity with all nations.

Franklin P. Adams

For two hours, some guy followed me around with a pooper scooper.

Rodney Dangerfield

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

Rebecca West

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead

Voltaire

Their memory's like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can't remember Tell the things you can't forget that History puts a saint in every dream.

Tom Waits

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

Karl Marx

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Karl Marx

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

Harry S. Truman

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

Peter Conrad

After making love to this girl she started crying, I said Are you going to hate yourself in the morning, No I hate myself now

Rodney Dangerfield

I went to look for a used car and found my wife's dress in the back seat.

Rodney Dangerfield

History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.

Stephen King

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

Terry Pratchett

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' one of Yvonne's stock phrases makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

Christopher Hitchens

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf