history-quotes

History is more or less bunk.

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.

- Martin Luther King Jr

History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

- Martin Luther King Jr

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

- Winston Churchill

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

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.

Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition, and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

- Pablo Picasso

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

The history taught in our schools is scandalous. We grew up believing that Columbus actually discovered America. We still celebrate Columbus Day. Columbus was after one thing only - gold.

- Woody Harrelson

Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.