Quotes About History

Ideological clashes, antagonism, and fixations are as old as civilization.

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?

Our duty would be to create, in the place of the outdated (Ottoman) Empire, a new national entity in harmony with its historic and linguistic unity and its desires.

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

don't ever believe that kings were done with when the fathers of the country made a revolution.

i wonder what goes on night and day beneath the surface of a cemetery.

there is no magic left in England now!

It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy.

Any single historical event is too complex to be adequately known by anyone. It transcends all the intellectual capacities of men. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten. Of course things seem simpler then! Our memories work that way; we retain the facts which are easiest to think about.

Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated-- but not in politics... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for the future generations, not to distil a drug.

Decisive results come sooner from sudden shocks than from long- drawn pressure. Shocks throw the opponent off his balance. Pressure allows him time to adjust himself to it. That military lesson is closely linked with the general experience of history that human beings have an almost infinite power of accommo-' dation, to degradation of living conditions, so long as the process is gradual.

The enigma of history," thus we have styled him, though the title "Father of German unity," or again, "Father of grand strategy," would have been equally just--that is, if we can associate so homely a word as "father" with that cold unemotional mind, so utterly detached from the instincts and prejudices of normal humanity, soaring to a purely intellectual atmosphere too rarified for ordinary minds to breathe.

Prophecy is a record of things before they transpire. History is a record of them after they have occurred; and of the two, prophecy is more to be trusted for its accuracy than history.

The past is just that.

We will never lose sight of our heritage, for if we forget where we came from we will lose our way forward.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That's why we call it the present.

Marty McFly Jesus, George, it's a wonder I was ever born.

Libraries ... are as the shrines where all the relics of ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

Because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical.

Before history began there must have been in the nation which writes it much progress; else there could have been no history. It is a great advance in civilisation to be able to describe the common facts of life, and perhaps, if we were to examine it, we should find that it was at least an equal advance to wish to describe them.