History Quotes
History is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events.
Below, you will find a list of history quotes. We hope these quotes will inspire you to know more about history, find out what history means to us as people and what we can learn from studying it.
80 Quotes & Sayings About History
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside._John F. Kennedy
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.” – George Santayana
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” – Victor Hugo
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history._Mahatma Gandhi
“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” – H.G. Wells
“A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.” – Annie Besant
“History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.” – Graydon Carter
“Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.” – Hermann Hesse
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 repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx
“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.” – Hermann Hesse
“Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” – Martin Luther
“History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” – Malcolm X
“History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.” – B.C. Forbes
“Life moves fast. As much as you can, learn from your history, you have to move forward.” – Eddie Vedder
“What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles.” – George Wilhelm Hegel
“A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” – Edward Gibbon
“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” – Will Durant
“The people who have really made history are the martyrs.” – Aleister Crowley
“History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.” – Mahmoud Darwish
“Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.” – Marge Piercy
“History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” – Karl Vonnegut
“People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.” – G.K. Chesterton
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston Churchill
“It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.” – Karl Marx
“On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.” – Alfred de Vigny
“The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.” – Golda Meir
“History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.” – George Santayana
“History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” – Ambrose Bierce
We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it._John F. Kennedy
“We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes.” – Adolf Hitler
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” – Plato
“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.” – Aldous Huxley
“History shows you don’t know what the future brings.” – Rick Wagoner
“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” – Bar Rafaeli
“If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.” – E.O. Wilson
“All our experience with history should teach us, when we look back, how badly human wisdom is betrayed when it relies on itself.” – Martin Luther
“The best prophet of the future is the past.” – Lord Byron
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” – C. Wright Mills
“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it._George Santayana
“The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?” – David McCullough
“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.” – Will Durant
“History, a distillation of rumour.” – Thomas Carlyle
“History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.” – Anselm Kiefer
“History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” – Lord Acton
“History shows that there are no invincible armies.” – Joseph Stalin
“There is properly no history; only biography.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.” – Karl Marx
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” – Robert Kennedy
“I’ve been completely fascinated with history because it tells everything about what’s going to happen next because it’s cyclical, everything repeats in general.” – Emile Autumn
“Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.” – Eckhard Pfeiffer
“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.” – William Hazlitt
“Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” – Oscar Wilde
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. James Baldwin
“History is information. Memory is part of your identity.” – David Miliband
“Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.” – Voltaire
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
“History is merely gossip.” – Oscar Wilde
“I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for ‘history’. The closest word for it is memory.” – David Miliband
“Black history is American history.” – Morgan Freeman
“History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.” – Ted Coppell
“Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.” – David Ben Gurion
“It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven’t changed since time began. We’re still the same. We’ve obviously made some changes.” – Colin Hay
“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.” – James Baldwin
“I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.” – Daisaku Ikeda
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” – George Orwell
“Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.” – Thomas Friedman
“History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.” – Thomas Carlyle
“The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.” – Leon Trotsky
“History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” – David McCullough
“We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.” – Anatole Broyard
“Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.” – Anne Sullivan
“History is a pack of lies we play on the dead. “ – Voltaire
“History develops, art stands still.” – E.M. Forster