History Quotes About the Past & Its Lessons | GloryQuotes

Famous History Quotes

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Thomas Jefferson

What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

Benjamin Disraeli

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

Mohandas Gandhi

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

Mohandas Gandhi

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

Quotes About History Repeating Itself

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.

Clarence Darrow

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.

We may repeat the awful revolutionary history of the 20th century because of the vulnerability of social movements to demagoguery.

Todd Gitlin

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

Paul Valery

History has repeatedly shown that when a new method or material becomes available, new uses for it arise.

Wilson Greatbatch

Women's History Quotes

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history.

Kate Millett

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

George Washington

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Erica Jong

Love is the whole history of a woman's life, it is but an episode in a man's.

Madame de Stael

I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.

Vivienne Westwood

More History Quotes

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

Henry David Thoreau

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

George Bernard Shaw

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Honore de Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore de Balzac

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of society.

Henry David Thoreau

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Mohandas Gandhi

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

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

Theodore Roosevelt

It's a question of whether we're going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

Theodore Roosevelt

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Marcus Aurelius

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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

William Hazlitt

One's past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

John F. Kennedy

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?

David Herbert Lawrence

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

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

Richard M. Nixon

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Will Durant

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Dwight D. Eisenhower

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

John F. Kennedy

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

There are certain moments when we might wish the future were built by men of the past.

The wise man must remember that while he is a descendant of the past, he is a parent of the future.

Herbert Spencer

Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

Charles Dickens

The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.

Erich Fromm

Billions of people have seen and been influenced by movies in the short history of this industry.

Conrad Hall

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

Explore history quotes about history, memory and lessons from the past, drawn from a broad collection of notable voices. Sections such as Famous History Quotes, Quotes About History Repeating Itself make the page easier to browse by intent, while links to Teacher Quotes and Book Quotes connect closely related ideas. Each quote can also lead readers to an eligible author page for deeper browsing.