Quotes about History

“The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.”

“After finishing the gymnasium in Muenchen with 9 years of Latin and 6 years of ancient Greek, history and philosophy, I decided to become a physicist. The great theoretical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, an university colleague of my late father, advised me to begin with an apprenticeship in precision mechanics.”

“God cannot alter the past, though historians can.”

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

“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

“You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.”

“Strip malls are history.”

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

“Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.”

“History will decide if I'm a villain or a hero.”

“My dad is white, he's an art history teacher, he's very traditional.”

“American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.”

“If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.”

“The most important thing is to win the Champions League because you can win the Ballon d'Or and not stay in history.”

“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”

“My earliest books focus almost entirely on psychological tools to help readers employ effective commonsense approaches to problems. There are no references to God or a higher self in the first 15 or so years of my publishing history.”

“If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.”

“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”

“The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.”

“I love reading. I'm very much into history, novels, biographies and I have a wide range of thrillers.”

“I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.”