Quotes on History

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

A generation without history is a generation that not only loses a nation's memory but loses a sense of what it's like to be inside a human skin.

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

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?

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

It's the mix of the trivial and the great events that make up history. It's the low things about high people that make it fascinating, and that's why it would be a shame to exclude the trivial things. That mixing up is not just at the heart of history. It's at the heart of how to live a great life.

The great theme of modern British history is the fate of freedom. The 18th century inherits, after the Civil War, this very peculiar political animal. It's not a democracy, but it's not a tyranny. It's not like the rest of the world, the rest of Europe. There is a parliament, laws have to be made, elections are made.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them.

I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'

I think history repeats itself. There's a constant conversation between the oppressed and the oppressor. No matter what your field is, whether it's gender equality, the Time's Up movement, or diversity casting, it's always going to be a back-and-forth battle.

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can't do this. That's the trade-off.

What the history of aviation has brought in the 20th century should inspire us to be inventors and explorers ourselves in the new century.

History will not judge HIV/AIDS kindly... the harshest words will be reserved for how the world responded, or rather failed to respond, to the epidemic.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact.