Explore Quotes on History

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

Reading a newspaper is like reading someone's letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.

If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.

I don't ever remember a single day of hopelessness. I knew from the history of the labor movement, especially of the black people, that it was an undertaking of great trial. That, live or die, I had to stick with it, and we had to win.

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.

If given the choice between Righteousness and Peace, I choose Righteousness.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.

I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.