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Quotes about history

176 quotes from 130 people

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Let not Ambition mock their useful Toil,
Their homely Joys and Destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful Smile,
The short and simple Annals of the Poor.
Thomas Gray1716–1771Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)In context
- Work
Destiny is something not to be desired and not to be avoided … it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.
Dag Hammarskjöld1905–1961Vägmärken · Markings (1963), 26 December 1956
- Philosophy
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
My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
Thomas Hardy1840–1928The Dynasts (1904–1908), Pt. II, sc. v, Spirit Sinister
- War & Peace
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
A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988Time Enough for Love (1973)
I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.
Herodotus484–425 BCThe Histories, Book 7, Ch. 152.
- Truth & Lies
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap.
Hermann Hesse1877–1962Steppenwolf (1927), PrefaceIn context
- Change
The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit lives on.
Edmund Hillary1919–2008Sir Edmund Hillary: King Of The World
The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes.
Adolf Hitler1889–1945
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms.
Eric Hobsbawm1917–2012“Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today” (February 1992). Anthropology Today.
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.
Where does barbarism leave off and civilization begin?… We can hardly conceive ourselves to be the sole possessors of the only true civilization that the world has ever known.
Robert E. Howard1906–1936From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (March 6, 1933)
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
Langston Hughes1901–1967The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)In context
- Nature
On the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals, by the side of a wrinkle, one always finds a scar. Tempus edax, homo edacior; which I should be glad to translate thus: time is blind, man is stupid.
Victor Hugo1802–1885The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Book Third, Chapter IIn context
- Time