Quotes on History

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

One who comes to the Court must come to adore, not to protest. That's the new gloss on the First Amendment.

Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.

There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it.

It seems very strange ... that in the course of the world's history so obvious an improvement should never have been adopted. ... The next generation of Britishers would be the better for having had this extra hour of daylight in their childhood.

The United States was born in revolution and nurtured by struggle. Throughout our history, the American people have befriended and supported all those who seek independence and a better way of life.

I went into boxing, and I'm bisexual, and I still achieved and performed at the highest level, and I came away with gold and made history, so with that said, anything is possible.

To all those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past I extend my sincere thoughts and deep sympathy. With the benefit of historical hindsight we can all see things which we would wish had been done differently or not at all.

Never limit yourself because of others' limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.

It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

History has proven that art depicting black people cannot be disentangled from the political implications that such art has on their lives. As Africans were being stripped from the continent and sailed across the Atlantic to the Western world, depictions of black people in Western art changed in order to further render them racialized caricatures.

every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.

Conservation means development as much as it does protection._x000D_ _x000D_ A man's usefulness depends upon his living up to his ideals insofar as he can.

The history of science shows that theories are perishable. With every new truth that is revealed we get a better understanding of Nature and our conceptions and views are modified.

I believe human beings mark a threshold in the development of the planet, of course, but it is only part of the picture. What Big History can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power, with collective learning.