History Quotes

Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of [Bob] Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

At my age I'm exactly the kind of person who has lived through one of the most quickly changing periods known to history. Surely there could never be in seventy years so much change.

Without Jimmy Dean, the Beatles never would have existed.

Samuel Gompers has spent his life trying to keep labor from working too hard and has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

No one can read the history of astronomy without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes, Hipparchus, Empodocles, Aristorchus, Pythagorus, Oenipodes, had anticipated them.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

The world is the expanding Greece and Greece is the shrinking world.

There are moments in history when brooding tragedy and its dark shadows can be lightened by recalling great moments of the past.

When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'

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

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.

If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.

The real war will never get in the books.

The Times are the masquerade of the eternities; trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which the genius of today is building up the Future.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.

Civilizations have come and gone and, in spite of our vaunted progress, I am tempted to ask again and again, 'To what purpose?'

Indeed, it may be laid down as a general principle, that the more extended the ancestry, the greater the amount of violence and vagabondism; for in ancient days those two amusements, combining a wholesome excitement with a promising means of repairing shattered fortunes, were at once the ennobling pursuit and the healthful recreation of the Quality of this land.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

My favorite record label of all time is Motown. That era of music was my favorite.

Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.

How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.

Do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity, the Declaration of Independence.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

Those who do not know history will forever remain children

I think George Washington owned guns. I've never seen any contradiction with that.

The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House. Not directly, but indirectly.

We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.

We have learned nothing.

The America that has flourished for more than two centuries is being quietly but steadily dismantled by the Obama administration.

One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

English law in 1572 decreed that beggars above 14 years of age are to be severely flogged and branded on the left ear unless some one will take them into service for two years; in case of a repetition of the offense, if they are over 18, they are to be executed, unless some one will take them into service for two years; but for the third offence they are to be executed without mercy as felons.

I've long believed that one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone's child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or a corporation. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of a land of small farmers, of shopowners, and merchants. Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act that ensured that the great western prairies of America would be the realm of independent, propertyowning citizens-a mightier guarantee of freedom is difficult to imagine.

For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.

While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognitato them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.

Such were garrulous and noisy eras, which no longer yield any sound, but the Grecian or silent and melodious era is ever soundingand resounding in the ears of men.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

...one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can't say is that it's rational.

George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country.

In America, one of the great liberal documents of the world is the Declaration of Independence. One of the great conservative documents of the world is the Constitution of the United States. We need both documents to build a country. One to get it started - liberal. And the other to help maintain the structure over the years - conservative.

It was the Russians that introduced the Chinese to Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin but did not even know of Marx or Engels. The salvos of the October Revolution awoke us to Marxism-Leninism.

Although there are some parallels to the problems that we're seeing now and what we say back in the '30s, no period is exactly the same. For us to simply recreate what existed back in the '30s in the 21st century, I think would be missing the boat. We've gotta come up with solutions that are true to our times and true to this moment. And that's gonna be our job. I think the basic principle that government has a role to play in kick starting an economy that has ground to a halt is sound.

The Model T blazed the way for the motor industry & started the movement for good roads everywhere. It is still the pioneer car in many parts of the world which are just beginning to be motorized.

History is not hatred.

You can't solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and [the problem's] past history! When you have investigated the problem thoroughly, you will know how to solve it.

Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

Christopher Columbus was looking for a passage to India, but he landed in America. He landed in the wrong place, and when he got back, he wasn't sure where he'd been. But most important of all, he did it on someone else's money.

Islam has always been part of America

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous crew,The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen where are they?

In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.

It was not the United States who invaded Kuwait; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that went to war with Iran; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that fired chemical weapons at Iran; it was Iraq. And it was not the United States that murdered innocent Iraqi citizens with chemical weapons; it was Iraq.

It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word 'pessimist' was not in our vocabulary at that time. It's a modern 'invention' which I believe we should 'dis-invent.'

Specifically, the part where in the early 19th century America reconstituted the U.S. Marine Corps to battle the Islamic Barbary Pirates, though I don't think that's what Obama meant.

The first election in which all South Africans took part was in April, 1994. There were long queues [lines] of employers and employees, black and white. In the sense of Africans, Coloreds and Indians - when I talk about blacks, I mean those three. Blacks and whites mingled to vote without any hitches. Many people would have expected a great deal of tension, clashes and violence, but it did not occur.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.