Quotes on History

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

My history has been to grow the roots as deeply as you can before going on to the next thing. That's why it took 10 years to go from Union Square Cafe to Gramercy Tavern, and another 10 years to go from Blue Smoke's first location to its second, and five to go from Shake Shack 1 to Shake Shack 2.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.

I cannot write about the past unless I go where history happened. Some make very good armchair historians, I'm not one of them. If you're going to inhabit someone else's world, the very least you can do is to spend a little time in it.

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.

When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

My message was 'Think African. Make schools read African history.'

History and socio-economic inequality and all those things had, like, borne down upon my family and my community and really sort of narrowed our choices.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Which would you rather be, a conqueror in the Olympic games, or the crier that proclaims who are conquerors?

The history is important because science is a discipline deeply immersed in history. In other words, every time you perform an experiment in science or in medicine, what you're actually doing is you're answering someone, answering a question raised by someone in the past.

What I'm concerned with is what I would call the missing history - the invisible imprint of our stay on Earth and in time.

Blacks in America want to forget about slavery - the stigma, the shame. If you can't be who you are, who can you be? How can you know what to do? We have our history. We have our book, and that is the blues.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

No one would have doubted his ability to reign had he never been emperor.

We may not live in the past, but the past lives in us.