History Quotes - Page 10

• To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

  Hermann Hesse

  Faith, Mean, Order

  Hermann Hesse (2002). “The Glass Bead Game: (Magister Ludi) A Novel”, p.169, Macmillan

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• A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldnt have happened without the social changes.

  Steve Winwood

  Change, Music, Thinking

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• With regard to military discipline, I may safely say that no such thing existed in the Continental Army.

  Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben

  Military, Army, Discipline

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• Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

  Oscar Handlin

  Writing, Discovery, Usa

  Oscar Handlin (2002). “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People”, p.3, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.

  Katha Pollitt

  God, Country, Children

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• Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the truth too near the heels it may haply strike out his teeth.

  Walter Raleigh

  Writing, Teeth, May

  'The History of the World' (1614) preface

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• History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

  Edward Gibbon

  War, Tourism, Littles

  'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' (1776-88) ch. 3.

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• Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

  Winston Churchill

  Lying, Secret, Study

  "Churchill By Himself".

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• A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.

  Henry Adams

  Definitions, Want, Equilibrium

  Henry Adams (1920). “The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma”

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• A new future requires a new past.

  Eric Foner

  Past, New Future

  Eric Foner (2003). “Who Owns History?: Rethinking the Past in a Changing World”, p.83, Macmillan

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• This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.

  Tacitus

  Evil, Deeds, Action

  Tacitus (2007). “The Annals & The Histories”, p.25, Modern Library

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• Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.

  Thomas A. Bailey

  Historical, Halos, Definitions

  Thomas A. Bailey (1969). “Essays Diplomatic and Undiplomatic of Thomas A. Bailey”, p.15, Ardent Media

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• The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Duty

  1891 Intentions, 'The Critic as Artist'.

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• It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

  Robert Kennedy

  Change, Hope, Courage

  Robert F. Kennedy (1998). “Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy”, Harcourt

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• History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

  Henry Steele Commager

  Order, Surprise, Blunders

  Henry Steele Commager, Raymond Henry Muessig (1980). “The study and teaching of history”, Merrill Publishing Company

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• 

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

  James Joyce

  Truth, Trying, Nightmare

  Ulysses (1922)

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• Sometimes it can seem that history is turning in a wide arc, toward an unknown shore. Yet the destination of history is determined by human action, and every great movement of history comes to a point of choosing.

  George W. Bush

  Movement, Determined, Action

  Fifth Presidential State of the Union Address, delivered 31 January 2006

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• History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.

  John Betjeman

  Sides, Given, Bias

  1952 First and Last Loves.

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• Clio may be the most austere and chaste of the Muses, but she has been known to come down informally from Mount Helicon in a mood so raffish that there are those who claim to have seen her with her slip showing.

  Thornton Willis

  May, Muse, Mood

  Willis Thornton (1992). “History: Facts and Fable”, Dorset Pr

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• History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

  John Barth

  Knaves, Events, Historian

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• We study history in order to intervene in the course of history.

  Adolf von Harnack

  Order, Study, Courses

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• Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  People, Vacant, Tiresome

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

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Peace, War, Philosophical

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• And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

  G. M. Trevelyan

  Men, Space, Long

  G. M. Trevelyan (2016). “History and the Reader”, p.24, Cambridge University Press

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• Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.

  Jacques Ellul

  Philosophy, Human Experience, Humans

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