History Quotes
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.
3212 Svetlana Alexievich
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.
3284 Svetlana Alexievich
But I don't just record a dry history of events and facts, I'm writing a history of human feelings.
2204 James Joyce
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
2970 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.
2047 Toba Beta
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.
2779 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.
1824 Priya Ardis
He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again.
I pictured smacking him in the face.
3568 Priya Ardis
Matt was almost completely naked. A tattered loincloth and an ugly chain with a yellow diamond were his only apparel.
4568 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.
3296 Anne Frank
Work, love, courage and hope,
Make me good and help me cope!
1978 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.
3068 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.
2898 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.
1569 Kate Mosse
For when all else is done, only words remain. Words endure.
4804 Lee Benson
History never repeats itself, historians do.
2343 Oscar Wilde
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
2941 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.
3470 Marty Rubin
We don't know history. We only know what has been written about it.
4967 Lailah Gifty Akita
In the history of the world, we have left our footprints by our unique stories.
4739 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.
3215 Richard Marius
We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
2967 Sara Sheridan
We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
2140 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.
1535 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.
4365 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.
3593 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.
3066 Roger Zelazny
No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.
1903 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.
2908 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.
3942 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.
3951 Anne Frank
The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?
4645 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.
2822 Janet Wallach
Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.
2480 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...
1780 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?
4214 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.
2506 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.
1882 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.
2275 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.
4216 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.
2408 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!
1101 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.
1549 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.
2828 Shreyansh Jaiswal
World praises the amalgamation of conscious & unconscious, History is the testament.
4287 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.
2595 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.
3443 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.
1483 Mitch Rowland
History tends to play games with the truth, but at least it does so with a flourish.
2570 Sara Sheridan
History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.
4530 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.
1620 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.
2040 Sara Sheridan
Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.
1438 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.
3540 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.
4552 Sara Sheridan
Small details are a vital part of allowing a reader to make an imaginative connection with long dead historical figures.
1134 Neil MacGregor
It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.
1337 John Cleese
Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.
3184 Slash Coleman
Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?
1328 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.
1867 Peter Adejimi
History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.
1553 Anne Burack Sayre
Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.
1038 Galinda Glinda
Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?
1819 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.
2834 Patrick Lane
Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.
3609 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.
2619 Kiera Cass
Sometimes I feel like we're a knot, too tangled to be taken apart.
3078 Lemony Snicket
Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.
3723 George Bernard Shaw
We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
4498 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.
1940 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]
2631 Jim Hinckley
It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.
2945 Jenny Han
It’s hard to throw away history. It was like you were throwing away a part of yourself.
4518 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.
1986 Peter Lamborn Wilson
Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.
2106 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.
1900 Dan Brown
Learning the truth has become my life's love.
1612 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.
4507 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.
1780 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.
1954 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.
1849 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.
1701 Michael Duncan
If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?
3174 Raquel Cepeda
The truth is usually left for us to hunt and gather independently, if we are so inclined.
2761 Toba Beta
History engineered if the facts couldn't be generally accepted.
4733 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?
4371 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.
3530 Toba Beta
God was never created the economy.
Men found it after banished from Eden.
1633 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.
2383 Rivka Galchen
Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.
4727 Frederick Rolfe
The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.
1177 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.
1206 Toba Beta
Selfrighteous creates wars more often than other reasons.
2461 Tadeusz Pankiewicz
Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.
2271 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.
1656