Quotes About History

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.

In the absence of full-fledged Congressional investigations, American policymakers rarely look back. They are bound by continuity and fealty across administrations and generations.

Absolutely, I don't believe in rules. As I tell my daughter when she is mischievous, 'Well-behaved women rarely make history.'

The U.S. government has rarely, if ever, used the criminal history of a certain immigrant population in determining if the whole community should be allowed to remain in the country under a humanitarian program, like TPS.

Rarely do you meet an American who knows his Wordsworth.

History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!

Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents for the last 13,000 years?

I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.

Having culture means we are the only animal that acquires the rules of its daily living from the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors, rather than from the genes they pass to us.

I'm the treasurer of the state of Ohio, where, when the United States credit rating was downgraded for the first time in American history, and 14 government funds around the country were downgraded, we earned the highest rating we could earn on our $4 billion investment fund.

Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.

I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.

I didn't read children's books when I was a child. The only books in our house were ration books.

I find humanism to be the most rational and positive philosophy for life. And it's not a new thing at all - the history of humanist thought is deep and inspiring.

At a certain moment, Yugoslavia stopped being rational, and then you end up going to war.

Of all the peoples of the world, the Chinese are probably the most at home with their excrement. They know its value. For 4,000 years they have used raw human feces to fertilize fields.

Being on 'Raw,' being part of the first-ever women's Royal Rumble match and the first-ever Elimination Chamber was incredibly exciting.

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

We all know that Ray Kroc founded the McDonald's franchise back in the 1950s, and it then became the most successful business enterprise in history.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

I was the first white British woman to reach No 1 on the R&B chart - the American black music chart.

If you're in America or Europe, walk for three blocks, and you'll pass about 14 Vikings. Their reach was immense.

Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings.

True there has been more talk of peace since 1945 than, I should think, at any other time in history. At least we hear more and read more about it because man's words, for good or ill, can now so easily reach the millions.