History Quotes

Christopher Paolini

People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.

Richard Marius

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

Svetlana Alexievich

If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is
If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath.

Svetlana Alexievich

But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts, I'm writing a history of human feelings.

Winston S. Churchill

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Masashi Kishimoto

When a man learns to love, he must bear the risk of hatred.

James Joyce

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

Moderata Fonte

Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.

Toba Beta

There are people who desperately want to change the world. I wonder if it could be
There are people who desperately want to change the world.
I wonder if it could be measured, because the world is already
in the state of continuously change since the beginning of time.
Or they may just want their names etched nicely on men history.

Robin Schone

A woman's got one life: She's got to reach out and grab it with both hands, or it'll pass her by and leave nothing but a smelly old fart in her face.

Priya Ardis

He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again.
I pictured smacking him in the face.

Priya Ardis

Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.

Priya Ardis

Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.

Anne Frank

Work, love, courage and hope,
Make me good and help me cope!

John Kennedy Toole

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

Dan Simmons

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

Esther M. Friesner

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

Kate Mosse

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

Lee Benson

History never repeats itself, historians do.

Oscar Wilde

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

Beck

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Marty Rubin

We don't know history. We only know what has been written about it.. Marty Rubin
We don't know history. We only know what has been written about it.

Lailah Gifty Akita

In the history of the world, we have left our footprints by our unique stories.

Jerril Thomas Abraham

When you walk,go different roads that take you nowhere,and see your world.

Nina Sankovitch

I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.

Richard Marius

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

Sara Sheridan

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

Sara Sheridan

Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.

Ronald P. Chavez

When I write to please everybody, it falls flat. When I write what I know, fearlessly, It won't please everybody, but it doesn't fall flat.

Rebecca McNutt

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

Sara Sheridan

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country - a very different world - and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.

Roger Zelazny

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

Sara Sheridan

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

Herbert George Wells

Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then - fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work - What are these Martians?
What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.

Teresa Flavin

The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.

Anne Frank

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?

C.G. Jung

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.

Christopher Henry Dawson

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Janet Wallach

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.

Herodotus

Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky...

James Hamilton-Paterson

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

Christopher Kelly

...history should continually seek to challenge our assumptions. It should prompt us to look differently at the world and make us less self-assured about our own ideals and beliefs.

Joseph J. Ellis

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

Ryan Lilly

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

Jay Mark D. Saga-ad

I am writing history, and I can't be there.

Rex Alan Smith

History that is presented only as ink-embalmed data is as a flower pressed in a book. Although the dry petals still hold all the elements of the original flower, they cannot show us how it looked blooming in the field. The color and fragrance - the true reality - or the flowers are gone.

Elizabeth Gaskell

Dixon was not unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her; nor did she dislike it; it flattered her as much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his presence.

Annika

The chickens bounced onto the pink and purple bush and landed on Annika's head." It's funny because nobody has ever said that before. I should get an award or something because I just made history!

Will Leitch

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

J.J. Scarisbrick

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

Shreyansh Jaiswal

World praises the amalgamation of conscious & unconscious, History is the testament.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

Whatever you do today, impacts your historicity.

Christopher Bram

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

Zbigniew Herbert

I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

John Scalzi

Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you're an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you're an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a living, which means that you don't have to lift heavy boxes or ask people if they want fries with that. Grow up and get back to work.

Mitch Rowland

History tends to play games with the truth, but at least it does so with a flourish.

Sara Sheridan

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

Sara Sheridan

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.

Sara Sheridan

History makes my mouth water - and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

Sara Sheridan

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

Sara Sheridan

I have no problem in moving a date one way or another or coming up with a subplot that gets my characters in (or out) of a fix more rambunctiously than the extant records show.

Sara Sheridan

Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.

Sara Sheridan

Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.

Neil MacGregor

It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.

John Cleese

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

Slash Coleman

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his
Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

Hilary Mantel

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

Peter Adejimi

History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.

Anne Burack Sayre

Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.

Galinda Glinda

Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?

Barbara W. Tuchman

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

Patrick Lane

‎Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.

Robert Lowell

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes.

Kiera Cass

Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.

Lemony Snicket

Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.. Lemony Snicket
Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.

George Bernard Shaw

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.. George Bernard Shaw
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Bertolt Brecht

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

David McCullough

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."

[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

Jim Hinckley

It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.

Jenny Han

It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.

Mark Twain

Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Peter Lamborn Wilson

Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.

Rachel Carson

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.

Dan Brown

Learning the truth has become my life's love.

Michael H. Hart

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

David Drake

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

Sheri S. Tepper

I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say..." They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision..." They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold..." But, if one says, "History teaches," then they will not believe.

Sara Gruen

Sometimes when you get older - and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently - things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true - why, then you get offended.

Tacitus

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

Michael Duncan

If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?

Raquel Cepeda

The truth is usually left for us to hunt and gather independently, if we are so inclined.

Toba Beta

History engineered if the facts couldn't be generally accepted.

Hermann Hesse

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?

Carl Lotus Becker

Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

Toba Beta

God was never created the economy.
Men found it after banished from Eden.

Col. Thomas Aspinwall

In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.

Rivka Galchen

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.

Frederick Rolfe

The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.

Toba Beta

There were three things sought by invaders who crossed
oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory.
There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens
to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.

Toba Beta

Selfrighteous creates wars more often than other reasons.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

Umberto Eco

In this universe of ours, with its wealth of errors and legends, historical data and false information, one absolute truth is the fact that Superman is Clark Kent. All the rest is always open to debate.

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