Quotes About History

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity.

Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.

Oh, no man knows Through what wild centuries Roves back the rose.

What man is, only his history tells.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.

America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Because of my personal history, my professional skills and my business achievements, I am a man nobody can expect to compare himself with.

How quickly was every bad thing discovered to be the fault of the previous administration (an evil set of men who wedded general stupidity to wickedness of purpose).

Have you never heard what the wise men say: all of the future exists in the past.

A man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

There are more black men incarcerated today than there were slaves in 1850.

History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison Of all they want to keep.

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.

History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force.

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.

Iron necessity is a thing which in the course of history men come to see as neither iron nor necessary.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive