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Quotes about history

176 quotes from 130 people

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What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel1770–1831Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction (tr. H. B. Nisbet, 1975)
- Government
The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.
Ulysses S. Grant1822–1885Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885), Ch. 3
- War & Peace
The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton1815–1902The Woman’s Bible (1898)
- Women
Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
ECEmil Cioran1911–1995History and Utopia (1960)
The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.
Nassim Nicholas Talebborn 1960The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 31
- Technology
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner1897–1962Requiem for a Nun (1951)
- Time
History a distillation of Rumour.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881The French Revolution. A History (1837), Pt. I, Bk. VII, ch. 5.
We celebrate the past to awaken the future.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963“Remarks at the 25th Anniversary of the Signing of the Social Security Act,” Hyde Park, New York (14 August 1960)
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855), On History.
The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881The Hero as Divinity
History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski1928–2017The New York Times, January 18, 1981 Quotation of the Day.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
George Eliot1819–1880The Mill on the Floss (1860), Book VI, ch. iiiIn context
- Happiness
- Women
It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James1843–1916Hawthorne (1879), Ch. I: The Early Years.
- Writing
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire1694–1778L’Ingénu, ch.10 (1767)
There’s a good reason why nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much.
Noam Chomskyborn 1928KGNU benefit at the University of Colorado at Boulder, April 5, 2003 (context: João Goulart)