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Quotes about history

176 quotes from 130 people

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Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions.
Niccolò Machiavelli1469–1527Discourses on Livy (c. 1517), Book I, Chapter 39
The theories, the dogmas and the scripts stand outside the gates of history. The dominant factor is the aspiration of the people and the ability to seek total identification with it.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto1928–1979Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 15
- Politics
It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of lasting importance to the human race.
Arnold Toynbee1852–1883Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 31
History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity; whose voice, but the orator’s, can entrust her to immortality?
Cicero107–43 BCDe Oratore – On the Orator (55 BC), Book II, Chapter 9, section 36
Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity.
John Quincy Adams1767–1848Oration at Plymouth (1802)
- Family
Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Jean-Paul Sartre1905–1980“Orphée Noir (Black Orpheus)”
- Poetry
In fact, our standard account of monetary history is precisely backwards. We did not begin with barter, discover money, and then eventually develop credit systems. It happened precisely the other way around.
David Graeber1961–2020Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Two, “The Myth of Barter”, p. 40
- Money
There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.
Plato429–349 BCTimaeus, 22c (tr. Benjamin Jowett)
Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
Carl Sagan1934–1996Cosmos (1980), p. 339
History is sympathetic to its authors.
John McAfee1945–2021Into the Heart of Truth (2001)
Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism… As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism.
Winston Churchill1874–1965The Second World War, Volume 1, The Gathering Storm, Mariner Books (1985), pp. 13-14. First published in 1948.
- Politics
Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour.
Charles IIIborn 1948Speech on Islam and the West to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (27 October 1993)
- Religion
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
Edward Gibbon1737–1794The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 (1776), Ch. 2
- Religion
We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic.
Frederick Douglass1817–1895Decoration Day address, Arlington National Cemetery (30 May 1871)
- War & Peace
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Concord Hymn (1837)In context
- America