History Quotes - Page 5

• Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Military, Oxygen, Hymns

  Speech to American Bar Association in London, 15 July 1985, in The Times 16 July 1985

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• Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

  Voltaire

  Crime, Dump, Tableau

  L'Ingenu ch. 10 (1767) See Gibbon 4

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• Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

  Amendments, Framers, Concern

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• History is a great dust heap.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Dust

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• Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Funny, Humor, People

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• It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

  Henry James

  Historical, Literature, Littles

  Hawthorne ch. 1 (1879)

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• The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Money, Economic Inequality, Giving

  Second Inaugural Address, 20 Jan. 1937

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• The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

  Willa Cather

  Wisdom, Country, Heart

  O Pioneers! pt. 1, ch. 5 (1913)

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• Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

  Nicolas Chamfort

  Horror, Whole, Sequence

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• The whole past is the procession of the present.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Past, Whole, Procession

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• Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Writing, Sin, Silent

  "Mitteilungen ueber GoetheBo". Book by Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, II. 9, 1810.

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• History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Inspirational, War, Past

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• It has become too easy to see that the luckless men of the past lived by mistakes, even absurd beliefs, so we may well fail in a decent respect for them, and forget that historians of the future will point out that we too lived by myths.

  Herbert J. Muller

  Mistake, Past, Men

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• Most of our people have never had it so good.

  Harold MacMillan

  People, British History

  Speech, Bedford, England, 20 July 1957.

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• If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

  Carter G. Woodson

  Race, African American, World

  Carter G. Woodson, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “The Mind of the Negro As Reflected in Letters During the Crisis 1800-1860”, p.3, Courier Corporation

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• The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

  Albert Camus

  Fighting, Prestige, Cases

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.139, Vintage

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• For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

  Thomas Carlyle

  Products

  "The Works of Thomas Carlyle".

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• Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

  A. O. Scott

  Cost, Pearls, Sometimes

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• [T]he historian must serve two masters, the past and the present.

  Fritz Stern

  Past, Two, Masters

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• France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

  Johnny Depp

  Europe, America, People

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Inspirational Life, Biographies, Theory

  Contarini Fleming pt. 1, ch. 23 (1832) See RalphWaldo Emerson 11

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• History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Historical, Way, Endless

  1978 In The Listener, 20 Apr.

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• 

  If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

  Elizabeth Blackwell

  Women, Memorable, Progress

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• History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

  Abba Eban

  Funny, Sarcastic, War

  Speech in London, 16 Dec. 1970, in The Times 17 Dec. 1970

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• If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Party, Passion, Learning

  In Thomas Allsop 'Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge' (18 December 1831)

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