history quotes

  • The second day of July1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. It ought to be solemnised with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the otherfrom this time forward, for ever more.

    -John Adams
      Letter to his wife, 3  Jul, on the vote of Congress for independence from Britain.

  • She†happens tostickout a foot just as history isrushing by.

    -Jerry Adler
      Of Fawn Hall, the secretary who helped Col Oliver North to dispose of top-secret papers,'the archetype of the  Accidental Celebrity'. In Newsweek, 9 Mar.

  • Happy is the country which has no history, and happier still is that musical comedyabout which one can find nothing to say.

    -James Agate
      In the Sunday Times.

  • In the United States today we have more than our fair share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own Four H Clubthe hopeless, hysterical, hypochondriacs of history.

    - SpiroT(heodore) Agnew
      Of media pundits. Speech, San Diego,11 Sep.

  • More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

    -Woody pseudonym of  Allen Stewart Konigsberg Allen
      Side Effects,'My Speech to the Graduates'.

  • The Master: records prove the title good: Yet figures fail you, for they cannot say How many men whose names you never knew Are proud to tell their sons they saw you play. They share the sunlight of your summer day Of thirty years; and they, with you, recall How, through those well-wrought centuries, your hand Reshaped the history of bat and ball.

    -Aristotle
      'To  John Berry Hobbs on his Seventieth Birthday'.

  • Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Literature and Dogma, preface.

  • The stars are dead. The animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      Spain.

  • Political history isfar too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young.Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

    -W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden
      A Certain World.

  • But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in†it tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me†the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

    -Jane Austen
      Northanger Abbey, vol.1, ch.14.

  • Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      The Advancement of Learning, bk.2, ch.2, section1.

  • California's power to cloud men's minds must never be Baldwin forgot.Under its spell we submitted foreight yearstothe governance of Ronald Reagan, who had trouble distinguishing history from old movie plots.

    - Russell Wayne Baker
      'Don't Look Back', in the NewYork Times,1  Aug.

  • Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

    -Julian Patrick Barnes
      A History of the World in101    Chapters,'Parenthesis'.

  • The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human historyand cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.

    - Saul Bellow
      Humboldt's Gift.

  • History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.

    - SirJohn Betjeman
      First and Last Loves.

  • History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

    - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
      The Cynic's Word Book. Retitled  The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

  • Quiza   la historia universal es la historia de la diversa entonacio n  de algunas meta  foras. It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

    -Jorge Luis Borges
      Otras inquisiciones,'La esfera de Pascal' (translated as The Fearful Sphere of Pascal,1964).

  • Science†is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization.

    - Max Born
      My Life and Views.

  • English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.

    - Malcolm Stanley Bradbury
      Stepping Westward, bk.2, ch.5.

  • To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history† Who would not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?

    - SirThomas Browne
      Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), ch.5.

  • For, strictly considered, what is all knowledge too but recorded experience, and a product of history; of which, therefore, reasoning and belief, no less than action and passion are essential materials?

    -Thomas Carlyle
      Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'History'.

  • History is the essence of innumerable biographies.

    -Thomas Carlyle
      Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'History'.

  • History is philosophy teaching by experience.

    -Thomas Carlyle
      Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'History'.

  • La historia me absolvera  . History will absolve me.

    - Fidel Castro (Ruz)
      Title of propaganda pamphlet.

  • The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

    -Willa Sibert Cather
      O Pioneers!, pt.1, ch.5.

  •    The view of history that we get through the kitchen window is a more gentle view, not of war and politics, but of familyand communityand sharing.

    -Julia McWilliams Child
      On studying cookbooks dating back to the1400s in the Library of Congress. In Memory and Imagination, PBS  TV, 15  Aug. Chinese poet and civil servant about whom very little is known. He  wrote  a  series  of  three  poems  on  his  separation  from  his wife, the result of a posting to Beijing.

  • The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery.

    - Lord Randolph Henry Spencer Churchill
      Speech to the Indian Empire Society, London,12 Dec.

  • Only thestudyof militaryhistory iscapable of giving those who have no experience of their own a clear picture of what I have just called the friction of the whole machine.

    - Karl von Clausewitz
      Principles of  War (translated by  J  J Graham).

  • Your verdict, gentlemen, will be less upon us than upon yourselves.We appear before you.You appear before history.

    - Georges Clemenceau
      Addressing the jury as a member of the defence at Zola's trial, 22 Feb, following the publication of  J'Accuse.

  • If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!

    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    Table Talk (published1835), entry for18 Dec.

  • To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

    - Auguste Isidore Marie Fran c° oise Comte
    ^4  Syste'  me de politique positive (Positive Philosophy).

  • I am convinced that we are going to make the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books.

    -John Dean
      Taped conversation with the President, Feb.

  • History never exactly repeats itself, but it does some rather good impressions.

    -John Dean
    Comparing the presidential styles of Richard Nixon and George W Bush. Quoted in Worse than Watergate (2004).

  • Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
      Contarini Fleming, pt.1, ch.23.

  • Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstonean extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisyand superstition and with one commanding characteristic.Whether Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying, or scribblingneveragentleman.Heisso vain that he wants to figure in history as the settler of all the great questions; but a parliamentary Constitution is not favourable to such ambitions. Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

    - Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
    c.1874  Letter.

  •    History is written for the victors and what they leave out is the losers.

    - Arthur Drexler
      In the NewYork Review, 27 Nov.

  • History is the endless repetition of the wrong way of living, and it'll start again tomorrow, if it's moved from here today. 296

    - Lawrence George Durrell
      In The Listener, 20  Apr.

  • If there are indeed any iron laws of history, one of them is surely that in any major crisis of the capitalist system, a sector of the liberal middle class will shift to the left, and then shift smartly back again once the crisis has blown over.

    -Terry Eagleton
      In the London Review of Books, 2 Dec.

  • History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

    - Abba originally Aubrey Solomon Eban
      Speech, London,16 Dec.

  • Psychology has a long past, but onlya short history.

    - Hermann Ebbinghaus
      Summary of Psychology.

  • Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

    - Dwight D(avid) Eisenhower
      In Time, 6 Oct.

  • History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

    - Dwight D(avid) Eisenhower
      Inaugural address, 20  Jan.

  • The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

    - George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans Eliot
      The Mill on the Floss, bk.6, ch.3.

  • After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now Eliot History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      'Gerontion'.

  • History may be servitude, History may be freedom.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.3.

  • A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.

    -T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
      Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.5.

  • There is properly no history; only biography.

    - RalphWaldo Emerson
    Essays: First Series,'History'.

  • To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofaras we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

    - Leslie A(aron) Fiedler
      'Cross the BorderClose  the Gap', in Playboy, Dec.

  • Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in historya plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. Those harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another, as wave follows upon wave; only one real fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations.Only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

    - H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens) Fisher
      History of Europe, introduction.

  •    History is more or less bunk. It's tradition.

    - Henry Ford
      Interview, Chicago Tribune, May.

  • L'histoire est condamne  e, par un vice de nature, au mensonge. History is condemned, bya defect of nature, to lies.

    -Thibault
      La Vie litte  raire, pt.17.

  • L'histoire n'est pas une science, c'est un art.Onn'y re  ussit que par l'imagination. History isnot a science. It is an art.One can succeed in it only through the imagination.

    -Thibault
      Le Jardin d'Epicure.

  • History is past politics, and politics is present history.

    - Edward Augustus Freeman
      Methods of Historical Study.

  • It does mean the end of Britain as an independent European state. It means the end of a thousand years of history.

    - Hugh Gaitskell
      On Britain joining the European Community. Labour Party conference speech, Oct.

  • Porque alla   los espan‹  oles y las otras naciones†como tienen historias divinas y humanas, saben por ellas cua  ndo empezaron a reinar sus Reyes y los ajenos†todo esto y mucho ma  s saben por sus libros. Empero vosotros, que carece  is de ellos, Que   memoria tene  is de vuestras antiguallas?, Quie  n fue el primero de nuestros Incas? Over there Spaniards and other nations know from their divine and human history when their Kings and other peoples' Kings began their reigns† Their books teach them all of this, and much more. But you, who have no books, what memories do you have of your ancient past? Who was our first Inca?

    - Inca Garcilaso de laVega
      Comentarios reales (TheRoyal Commentaries of Peru,1688), bk.1, ch.15.

  • He  las! Les femmes n'ont lu que le roman de l'homme et jamais son histoire. Alas, women have read only the novel of mankind, not the history.

    -The  ophile Gautier
      Mademoiselle de Maupin.

  • If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during whichthe conditionof thehumanrace was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

    - Edward Gibbon
    ^88  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch.3.

  •    Shame of the versifying tribe! Your history whither are you spinning? Can you do nothing but describe?

    -Thomas Gray
      A Long Story, l.17^20.

  • History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

    - Philip Guedalla
      Supers and Supermen,'Some Historians'.

  • The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.

    - Philip Guedalla
      The Two Marshals.

  • Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

    -Haile Selassie originally Prince RasTafari Makonnen
       Address to a special session of the UN General  Assembly, 4 Oct, making him the first head of state to address both that organization and the League of Nations.

  • War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

    -Thomas Hardy
      The Dynasts, pt.1, act 2, sc.5.

  • It would indeed be the ultimate tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more noble than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

    -William David Ormsby Gore, 5th Baron Harlech
      In the Christian Science Monitor, 25 Oct.

  • Experience and history teach†that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

    - Simon Heffer
      Lectures on the Philosophy of  World History, introduction.

  • Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery, Swift to be hurled Anywhere, anywhere, Out of the world!

    -Honorius of Autun
      'The Bridge of Sighs'.

  • Le but de l'art est presque divin: ressusciter, s'il fait de l'histoire; cre  er, s'il fait de la poe  sie. The goal of art is almost divine: to resuscitate, if it concerns history; to create, if it concerns poetry.

    -Victor Marie Hugo
      Cromwell, pre  face.

  • That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
      'A Case of  Voluntary Ignorance'.

  • Current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of colonial elites to repeat historyand follow the road travelled by the rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution and universal frustration.

    - Ivan Illich
      Celebration of  Awareness, ch.12.

  • The effect of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, and would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and the farmyard civilization of the Fabians.

    -William Ralph Inge
      The End of an  Age, ch.6.

  • What ishistory, in fact, but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man?

    -Washington Irving
      A History of NewYork, bk.4, ch.1.

  • A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

    -Washington Irving
    ^20  The Sketch Book,'The Broken Heart'.

  • It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

    - Henry James
      Hawthorne, ch.1.

  • The great modern corporations are so similar to independent or semi-independent states of the past that they can only be fully understood in terms of political or constitutional history, and management can only be properly studied as a branch of government.

    - SirAntony Rupert Jay
      Management and Machiavelli.

  • Man's contribution to human history is nothing more than a drop of sperm.

    -Jiang Qing or  Chiang Ch'ing
      In Newsweek, 20 Feb.

  •    The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

    - Philip Cortelyou Johnson
      'The Town and the  Automobile or the Pride of Elm Street', published in Writings (1979).

  • History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

    -James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
     Ulysses.

  • History teaches us that enmities between nations†do not last forever.Wemustconduct ouraffairsinsuchaway that it becomes in the communists' interests to agree on a genuine peace†to let each nation choose its own future, so long as that choice does not interfere with the choices of others. If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

    -John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
      Speech,  American University, Washington DC,10  Jun.

  • Whether you like it not, history is on our side.We will bury you.

    - Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev
      Remark to Western diplomats at the Kremlin,18 Nov. Khrushchev later claimed that he had meant 'We will overtake you [economically]', rather than this more sinister version.

  • If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.

    -William Lyon Mackenzie King
       Address to the House of Commons, Ottawa,18  Jun.

  • History is a tale of efforts that failed†aspirations that weren't realized, or wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected.

    - HenryAlfred Kissinger
      In the NewYork Times,13 Oct.

  • Painters of history make the dead live, and do not begin to livethemselvestill theyare dead.Ipaint the living, and they make me live!

    - Godfrey Kneller
    When asked why he preferred portraits to more prestigious history scenes. Quoted in  A Cunningham The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and  Architects (1829).

  • The most persistent sound that reverberates through men's history is the beating of war drums.

    - Arthur Koestler
      Janus;  A SummingUp,'Prologue: The New Calendar', sect.1.

  • History does not provide us with any instance of a society that repressed the economic liberties of the

    - Irving Kristol
    Hungarian-born  British  film  producer.  He  worked  in Vienna, Berlin  and  Hollywood  before  coming  to  Britain  in  the  early 1930s  where  he  founded  London  Film  Productions   and  the Denham Studios.

  • We declare: the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, aeroplanes, railways, magnificent shipswhat an enchantmentwhat a great epoch unrivalled in world history. 490

    - Mikhail Larionov
      'Rayonnist Manifesto', quoted in C Gray  The Russian Experiment in  Art (revised edn1986).

  • The Sitwellsbelong tothehistoryof publicity rather than of poetry.

    - F(rank) R(aymond) Leavis
      New Bearings in English Poetry, ch.2.

  • Baedeker is astonishingly enduring; travellers can use nineteenth-century editions with confidence, providing they take some elementary precautions. Many hotels will long since have disappeared, and the prices will be somewhat different, but if Baedeker says'On leaving the tunnel, the best view is on the right', it probably still is, unless somebody has shifted the mountain, and his descriptions of sceneryand where to go to see it at its best are still valid, as ispracticallyall of his potted history.

    - (Henry) Bernard Levin
      Hannibal's Footsteps.

  • A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

    - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
      Of Florence Nightingale.'Santa Filomena'.

  • History, at least in its ideal state of perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy.

    -1st Baron
      'Hallam's Constitutional History' in the Edinburgh Review, Sep.

  • The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

    -1st Baron
      'Sir  James Mackintosh's History of the Revolution in England, in1688' in the Edinburgh Review,  Jul.

  • The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

    -1st Baron
      House of Commons, 22 May.

  •    To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

    -Joseph R(aymond) McCarthy
      Of Catholicism. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,'To the Reader'.

  • History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

    - Archibald MacLeish
      In the Observer,12 Feb.

  • Let us be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good.Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetimenor indeed ever in the history of this country.

    -Stockton
      Speech, Bedford, 20  Jul. This is the original form of the oft- misquoted'You never had it so good'.

  • We tend to justify our actions and in a sense we color history to achieve that objective.

    - Robert Strange McNamara
    Quoted in Robert Siegel (ed)  The NPR Interviews (1994).

  • Ithink Isaid'All menare Jews excepttheydon't know it.'I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally. But I think it's an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.

    - Bernard Malamud
    'An Interview', in L and J Fields (eds) Bernard Malamud (1975).

  • History isn't through with me yet.

    - Ferdinand Edralin Marcos
      Remark, quoted in Sterling Seagrave The Marcos Dynasty.

  •    Thehistoryofall hithertoexisting society isthehistoryof class struggles.

    - Karl Heinrich Marx
      The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore,1888), opening sentence.

  • Our whole history inclines us towards the democratic powers.Our renaissance is a logical link between us and the democracies of the west.

    -Toma  s Garrigue Masaryk
      Inaugural address, 23 Dec.

  • L'histoire, cette vieille dame exalte  e et menteuse. History, this old, honoured and lying woman.

    - Guy de Maupassant
      Sur l'eau.

  • Roosevelt will probably go down into American history as a great hero. It is one of our Heavenly Father's characteristic jokes upon the American people, and in the usual bad taste.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
       Journal entry. Collected in The Diary of H. L. Mencken (published1990).

  • Hiswhole carcassseemedtobemade of iron.There was no give in himno bounce, no softness. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths made of granite.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
    Of President Grover Cleveland. Quoted in Fred Hobson Mencken:  A Life (1994).

  • It would be a curious reading of the history of thought to suggest that the absence of disagreement testifies to a developing discipline.

    - Robert King Merton
      Defending internal disputes among sociologists.'Now the Case for Sociology', in the NewYork Times Magazine,16  Jul.

  • History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

    - Henry Valentine Miller
      Plexus, ch.12.

  • No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.

    - C(harles) Wright Mills
      The Sociological Imagination, ch.1.

  • La Historia no se detiene nunca. D|a y noche su marcha es incesante. Querer detenerla ser|a como querer detener la Geograf|a. History never stops. It progresses ceaselessly day and night. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop Geography.

    - Augusto Monterroso
      Lo dema  s es silencio ('The Rest is Silence'),'Aforismos, dichos, etc'.

  • All that I know of our historyand thehistoryof the Indian Ocean I have got from books written by Europeans† Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach.

    - Sir V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) Naipaul
      A Bend in the River, ch.1,'The Second Rebellion'.

  • Who owns history? The public servants who make it, or the people who hire them and to whom they are accountable?

    -NewYorkTimes
      'Who Owns History?', editorial,19 Nov.

  • When it comes to the final judgements on political conduct, history is not merciful. It is just.

    -NewYorkTimes
      'Justice and Mercy in  Arkansas', editorial,17 Dec.

  • Today, children,Iam going totell you about thehistoryof Mr.Blackmaninthreesentences.Inthebeginning hehad the land and the mind and the soul together.On the secondday, they took thebodyaway tobarter itforsilver coins.On the third day, seeing that he was still fighting back, they brought priests and educators to bind his mind and soul so that these foreigners could more easily take his land and produce.

    -Ngu‹ u g|‹   waThiong'o originally James Nguu‹  g|‹
      Petals of Blood, ch.8.

  •    We dislike the IRA, most of us, and fear it.We are a peaceful and democratic people.But our history, our idealistic pretensions and our fatal ambivalence have stuck us with an ideology that is warlike and anti- democratic, and calls increasingly for further human sacrifice.

    -Joyce Carol Oates
      In the NewYork Review of Books, 29  Apr.

  • Of historyand its consequences it may be said: 'Those who can, gloat; those who can't, brood.' Englishmen are born gloaters; Irishmen born brooders. There are, it is true, brooders who take to gloating, and they did much to build the Empire.Yet the brooder-gloater, such as the Irishman turned Englishman, is not, as a human type, altogether a success. He is a little too much on his guard, like an excessivelyassimilated Jew, or a son of Harlem who has decided to'pass'. The past of the Irishman, the Jew, the Negro, is, psychologically, too explosive to be buried.

    -Cruise
      To Katanga and Back: a UN case history.

  • The best thing about the violence in Northern Ireland is that it's all so ancient and honorable† The Irish are in the same terrific position as the Shiites in Lebanon, the peasants in El Salvador, the blacks in America, the Jews in Palestine, the Palestinians in Israel (and everybody everywhere, if you read your history)enough barbarism has been visited on the Irish to excuse all barbarities by the Irish barbarians.

    - P(atrick) J(ake) O'Rourke
      Holidays in Hell.

  • The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.

    - Anna Pavlova
      The English: A Portrait of a People.

  • When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of [the] universe, every phase of present or past lifetherein, has been examined, classified, and coordinatedwith the rest, thenthemissionof sciencewill be completed.What isthisbut saying thatthetaskof science canneverend till man ceases to be, till history is no longer made, and development itself ceases?

    - Karl Pearson
      The Grammar of Science, pt.1, ch.5.

  • Sencillamente se me ocurre que la parodia se ha desplazado y hoy invade los gestos, las acciones. Donde antes hab|a acontecimientos, experiencias, pasiones, hoy quedan so  lo parodias. Eso trataba a veces de decirle a Marcelo en mis cartas: que la parodia ha sustitutido por completo a la historia. It's simply that I believe that parody has been displaced and that it now invades all gestures and actions.Where there used to be events, experiences, passions, now there are nothing but parodies. This is what I tried to tell Marcelo so many times in my letters: that parody had completely replaced history.

    - Ricardo Piglia
      Respiracio  n artificial, pt.2, ch.4 (translated as Artificial Respiration,1994).

  • There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

    - Sir Karl Raimund Popper
      The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol.2, ch.25.

  • Thehistoryof science, likethehistoryof all humanideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activitiesperhaps the only onein which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there.

    - Sir Karl Raimund Popper
      Conjectures and Refutations (published1963), ch.10.

  • History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.

    - (John) Enoch Powell
      Speech to Conservative Party conference,19 Oct.

  • The poet is a master of the quotidian, of conveying a whole history in two or three lines that point to an exact past drama and intensifya future one.

    - Sir V(ictor) S(awdon) Pritchett
      The Myth Makers,'Borges'.

  • The entirehistoryof scienceisa progressionofexploded fallacies, not of achievements. 678

    - Ayn Rand
      Atlas Shrugged.

  • We make historyand changing it is within our power.

    - Ronald Wilson Reagan
      On welcoming Soviet premier Mikhail S Gorbachev to the White House, 8 Dec.

  • The whole ofcontemporary history, theWorld Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledgewas no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. 701

    - Arundhati Roy
      The God of SmallThings.

  •    The remarkable legion of the unremarked, whose individual opinions are not colorful or different enough to make news, but whose collective opinion, when crystallized, can make history.

    -William Safire
      Of the so-called'silent majority'. Safire's New Political Dictionary.

  • The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.

    -Saki pseudonym of  Hector Hugh Munro
    The Chronicles of Clovis,'TheJesting of Arlington Stringham'.

  • In America journalism is apt to be regarded as an extension of history: in Britain, as an extension of conversation.

    - Anthony (Terrell Seward) Sampson
      TheAnatomy of BritainToday, ch.9.

  • Hansard is history's ear, already listening.

    - Herbert Louis, 1st Viscount Samuel Samuel
      House of Lords, Dec.

  • DefinitionScience is systematized positive knowledge, what has been taken as such in different ages and in different places. TheoremThe acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities which are truly cumulative and progressive.CorollaryThe history of science is the only history which can illustrate the progress of mankind. In fact, progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science.

    - George A Sarton
      The Study of the History of Science.

  • And what is time but shadows that were cast By these storm-sculptured stones while centuries fled? The stones remain; their stillness can outlast The skies of history hurrying overhead.

    - Siegfried Louvain Sassoon
     The Heart'sJourney, pt.9,'What is Stonehenge? It is the roofless past'.

  • Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer, This land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear. Inarticulate, arctic, Not written on by history, emptyas paper, It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles. 722

    - F(rancis) R(eginald) Scott
      Of Canada.'Laurentian Shield'.

  • 'I can't believe it! What will History say?' 'History, sir, will tell lies as usual.'

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Major Swindon and Gen Burgoyne. The Devil's Disciple, act 3.

  • Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame; Who seek, who hope, who love, who live, but thee: Thine eyes my pride, thy lips my history; If thou praise not, all other praise is shame.

    - Nevil originally Nevil Shute Norway Shute
    Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 90.

  • The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it aloneits ideologies and inventionswhich eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

    - Susan Sontag
      In Partisan Review,Winter.

  • History shows that there are no invincible armies.

    -Joseph originally Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili Stalin
      Radio broadcast, 3 Jul, announcing the declaration of war against Germany, three weeks before Hitler invaded.

  • The question of how to apply social theory to historical materials, as it is usually posed, is ridiculous.One does not apply theory to history; rather one uses history to develop theory.

    - Arthur S Stinchcombe
      Theoretical Methods in Social History, p.1.

  • The historyof theVictorian age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

    - (Giles) Lytton Strachey
      EminentVictorians, preface.

  • Life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

    - Graham Swift
      Waterland, ch.8.

  •   Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.

    - A(lan) J(ohn) P(ercivale) Taylor
    The Origins of the SecondWorldWar.

  • Like most of those who study history, Napoleon learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

    - A(lan) J(ohn) P(ercivale) Taylor
      BBC radio broadcast, 6 Jun.

  • History gets thicker and thicker as it approaches recent times.

    - A(lan) J(ohn) P(ercivale) Taylor
      English History1914^1945.

  • Unless we change our ways and our direction, our greatness as a nation will soon be a footnote in the history books, a distant memory of an offshore island, lost in the mist of time like Camelot, remembered kindly for its noble past.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      General election campaign speech, Bolton, 2 May.

  • History is hard to know†but†it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the timeand which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

    - Hunter S(tockton) Thompson
    Fear and Loathing in LasVegas, ch.8.

  •    Twickenham is one of those happy places which is not burdened with a history. 858

    -James Thorne
      Handbook to the Environs of London.

  • But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers.

    -J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien
      The Fellowship of the Ring, foreword.

  •    I am convinced that the history of so-called scientific work in our famous centers of European civilization will, in a couple of hundred years, represent an inexhaustible source of laughter and sorrow for future generations. The learned men of the small western part of our European continent lived for several centuries under the illusionthatthe eternal blessed life wastheWest'sfuture. They were interested in the problem of when and where this blessed life would come.But they never thought of how they were going to make their life better.

    - Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
      What is Art? (translated byV Tchertkoff).

  • Her logic was a combination of half-truths and cliche  s, her worldviewa compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

    -John Kennedy Toole
    A Confederacy of Dunces (published1980), ch.5, pt.3.

  • You have played out your role.Go where you belong: to the dustheap of history.

    - Leon originally Lev Davidovich Bronstein Trotsky
      To the Mensheviks, at the first Congress of Soviets following the October Revolution. Quoted in A J P Taylor From the BoerWar to the ColdWar: Essays onTwentieth-Century Europe (1995), p.271.

  • En effet, l'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs. In fact, history is nothing but a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

    -Voltaire pseudonym of  Fran c° ois Marie Arouet
      L'Inge  nu, ch.10.

  • But we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      The Star-Apple Kingdom,'The Schooner Flight', pt.6.

  • Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      Omeros, bk.6, ch.45, section 2.

  • The fate of poetry isto fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

    - Derek Alton Walcott
      In the NewYorkTimes, 8 Dec.

  • 'I often think,' he continued,'that we can trace almost all the disasters of English history to the influence of Wales!'

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      Decline and Fall, pt.1, ch.8.

  • No philosopher now looks for anything but the gradual evolutionoftheneworder fromtheold†Historyshows us no example of the sudden substitutions of Utopian and revolutionary romance.

    - SidneyJames Webb
      Fabian Essays.

  • The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference.

    - Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
      Of the Battle of Waterloo. Letter, 8 Aug.

  • Humanhistory becomesmoreand morea racebetween education and catastrophe.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      The Outline of History, vol.2, ch.41.

  • Now it is on the whole more convenient to keep history and theology apart.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      A Short History of theWorld, ch.37.

  •    There is no history of artthere is the history of artists.

    - Marianne Werefkin
      Lettres a'   un Inconnu (1901^05).Translated by Mara R Witzling (ed) inVoicing OurVisions:Writings byWomen Artists (1992).

  •    The epitaph on the Kennedyadministration became Camelota magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back.

    -Theodore H(arold) White
      In Search of History.

  • The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
    Intentions,'The Critic as Artist'.

  •    The main essentials of a successful Prime Minister are sleep and a sense of history.

    - (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
      The Governance of Britain.

  • My war history has been a simple one. I have just sat in my chair and written all the time.

    -Plum
      Letter to Ira Gershwin, 24 Jan.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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