“We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today.”
Quotes about history
951 quotes
Voices on history
“If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”
More on history
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
“The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.”
“History doesn't crawl; it leaps.”
“Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history; that man can never learn anything from history.”
“What we do in life, echoes in eternity.”
Gladiator, 2000. Film.
“You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon Ireland's history in their lineaments trace think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.”
“The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.”
“Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.”
“Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”
“The German national character is a favorite subject of character experts, probably because the less mature a nation, the more she is an object of criticism and not of history.”
“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”
“It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
“History shows that there are no invincible armies.”
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
“History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.”
“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”
“No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”