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Quotes about history

176 quotes from 130 people

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What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
Eric Hobsbawm1917–2012“Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today” (February 1992). Anthropology Today.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
Karl Marx1818–1883The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
John Lennon1940–1980Interview for KFRC RKO Radio (8 December 1980)
- Responsibility
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
Aleister Crowley1875–1947The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 4
The greatest changes in social life are wrought imperceptibly, and are only seen from afar.
Anatole France1844–1924The White Stone (1905), Ch. III, p. 135
- Change
When the history of our times is written, will we be remembered as the generation that turned our backs in a moment of global crisis or will it be recorded that we did the right thing?
Nelson Mandela1918–2013Nelson Mandela on Aids, 46664 Concert, Tromso, Norway (11 Jun 2005)
- Responsibility
For me it is a moment of anguish because all my life … you see, the whole of my adult life … I have believed in merger and the unity of these two territories.
Lee Kuan Yew1923–2015Press conference on Singapore’s separation from Malaysia (9 August 1965)
The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history.
Camille Pagliaborn 1947Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 40
- Religion
White Americans desire to be free of a past they do not want to remember, while Black Americans remain bound to a past they can never forget.
Nikole Hannah-Jonesborn 1976The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021)
- Race
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865The Gettysburg Address (1863)
- War & Peace
There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.
Franklin D. Roosevelt1882–1945Speech accepting renomination, Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia (27 June 1936)
- America
- Responsibility
At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.
Jawaharlal Nehru1889–1964“A Tryst with Destiny”, speech to the Constituent Assembly, New Delhi (14 August 1947)
- Freedom
Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress (1862)
- Responsibility
For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.
Barack Obamaborn 1961Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural Address (2013)
- Freedom
I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.
Ronald Reagan1911–2004The Evil Empire (1983)
- Politics