Quotes on History

This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

Elvis Presley was the big bang. He was the most influential single figure in the history of American pop culture. He changed the way we looked, thought, dressed, held a guitar. He didn't invent rock & roll, but he defined it in a way that everyone who followed him owes him a debt.

Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but _x000D_ victories.

The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.

Good history is good story-telling. And good story-telling demands empathy; it requires understanding different actors, differing motivations, competing goals.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.

Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

If you read about millions of people doing this and millions of people doing that, history seems remote and inaccessible.

Women throughout history have had to defy rigid conventions about what is and is not expected of them.

History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Our country has a painful history of mistrust between police departments and people of color. The overuse of stop-and-frisk has made those divisions much worse.

Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

We are the prisoners of history. Or are we?