History Quotes

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

George Bernard Shaw

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It's the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

Oscar Wilde

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

Mahatma Ghandi

"The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes".

Adolf Hitler

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Henry David Thoreau

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.

William Paley

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity.

Cicero

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

Voltaire

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

Konrad Adenauer

The vicissitudes of history, however, have not dissuaded them from their earnest search for a "third way" between socialism and capitalism, namely socialism.

Richard John Neuhaus

History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.

John Lecarre