Quotes About History

There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.

To know the great men dead is compensation for having to live with the mediocre.

Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature.

History is littered with examples of men who would become gods, but only one example of God becoming Man.

As long as there will be a man, there will be wars.

Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

Man and the earth move in orbits: what they did before, they will do again.

... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world's ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise.

What I want to know is how the white man, with the blood of black people dripping off his fingers, can have the audacity to be asking black people [why] they hate him?

Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.

Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.

What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

Men are so charmed with valor that they have pleased themselves with being called lions, leopards, eagles and dragons, from the animals contemporary with us in the geologic formations.

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.

History is man's best guess as to what the past would look like if everything had happened in chronological order.

The history of the world shows that when a mean thing was done, man did it; when a good thing was done, man did it.

The visual possibility of seeing the historical person (as opposed to the eternal Qur'anic man) on screen is arguably the single most important event allowing Iranians access to modernity.

A man will not need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.

But in the secret history of anger--one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.

Man arose to high moral vision two thousand years before the Hebrew nation was born.

Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.