Quotes About Time

When I look at history, I am a pessimist...but when I look at prehistory, I am an optimist.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.

Grace can and does have a history.

The Jew has his anchorage not in place but in time, in his highly developed sense of history as personal context. Six thousand years of self-awareness are a homeland.

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.

We cannot escape history.

We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

We are living through the most exciting, challenging and most critical time in human history. Never before has so much been possible; and never before has so much been at stake.

I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

The Thames is liquid history.

Those who did not live during the years close to 1789 do not know the pleasure of living.

Not a stone but has its history.

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

Longing on a large scale makes history.

To have a sense of history one must consider oneself a piece of history.

Each day is a drive through history.

There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.

We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.