Quotes About History

The more we know about the history of the universe, the more we know about ourselves and the questions we are driven to ask.

To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and archive mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past.

History is man-made, like this pair of shoes, though it pinches more.

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any "social contract" or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

That remains part of the problem—that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again.

I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Errors sanctified by long usage are not easily relinquished.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world of justice.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.

I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." (Washington DC, 12 May, 2008)

Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him! (said after capture of Saddam)

The concept of war crimes is an American invention.

A country losing touch with its own history is like an old man losing his glasses, a distressing sight, at once vulnerable, unsure, and easily disoriented.

We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear bought experience.

We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity, representing our liberty.

I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.

The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.