Quotes About History

Unlike modern man, who dreams of the world he will make, pre-modern man dreamed of the world he left.

Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.

If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.

In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don't worry, you'll burn out.

The first successful salesperson was not a man, it was Eve.

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.

John Paul II was one of the greatest men of the last century. Perhaps the greatest.

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

Of all the men who were said to be my contemporaries, it seemed to me that John Brown was the only one who had not died.

A fortified town is like a man cased in the heavy armor of antiquity, with a horse-load of broadswords and small arms slung to him, endeavoring to go about his business.

Young black men in America have an identity ascribed to them that is a direct legacy of slavery.

A man who thinks too much about his ancestors is like a potato-the best part of him is underground.

Not that which men do worthily, but that which they do successfully, is what history makes haste to record.

The methods by which men have met and conquered trouble, or been slain by it, are the same in every age.

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men.

Students of history are horror-struck at the massacres of old; but in the shambles, men are being murdered to-day.

Think of it. To go down to posterity as a 'man who lived among the cannibals.'

I have a history with charismatic, attractive men who just wear me out.

A man with a long history of racial discrimination should never run our government.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

A man is not necessarily a master because he happened to compose two or three centuries ago. Let us beware of the worship of mere antiquity.