History Quotes:

  • Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
    --John Adams (1735-1826)
  • In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.
    --Peter F. Drucker
  • History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstance
    --Donald Creighton, Canadian historian (1902-1979).
  • A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.
    --Jawaharial Nehru Indian Prime Minister
  • I am not caused by my history--my parents, my childhood and development. These are mirrors in which I may catch glimpses of my image.
    --James Hillman
  • There is properly no history; only biography.
    --Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • History is the science of what never happens twice.
    --Paul Valery
  • Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk.
    --J.C. Penney
  • History can never be covered up.
    --Zhu Rongji prime minister of China, as quoted by The New York Times
  • 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
  • Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
    --Benjamin Disraeli
  • If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
    --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
    --George Bernard Shaw
  • What we take for the history of nature is only the very incomplete history of an instant
    --Denis Diderot
  • Every time history repeats itself, the price goes up. I have heard it said that the first ingredient of success the earliest spark in the dreaming youth -- is this: dream a great dream.
    --John A. Appleman
  • History abhors determinism, but cannot tolerate chance.
    --Bernard De Voto (1897-1955) American author, journalist and critic
  • History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.
    --Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) French historian
  • Does history record any case in which the majority was right?
    --Robert A. Heinlein