Quotes on History

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.

History never repeats itself. Man always does.

A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.

Kings are the slaves of history.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

World history is a court of judgment.

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.

No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.