Quotes About History

The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.

I have come to esteem history as a component of friendships. In my case at least friendships are not igneous but sedimentary.

We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.

What the Puritans gave the world was not thought, but action.

If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?

Biography is higher gossip.

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.

Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast, The little tyrant of his fields withstood, Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

If I am a great man, then a good many of the great men of history are frauds.

Fair Greece! sad relic of departed worth! Immortal, though no more; though fallen great!

The glory that was Greece.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

At rare moments in history, by a series of accidents never to be repeated, arise flower societies in which the cult of happiness is paramount, hedonistic, mindless, intent upon the glorious physical instant.

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

A man finds room in a few square inches of his face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

Heredity is an omnibus in which all our ancestors ride, and every now and then one of them puts his head out and embarrasses us.

The man who has not anything to boast of but his illustrious ancestors is like a potato - the only good belonging to him is underground.

A genealogist is one who traces your family back as far as your money will go.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.

The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.