Quotes about History

“I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.”

“History written by the victims trickles down in the form of folklore.”

“I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”

“It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.”

“History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.”

“To be successful in anything, you have to have a passion for it, and that leads to being enthusiastic and demanding. I didn't have it for history. So I wouldn't have been a good teacher in that area. But I had it for basketball. And that's what coaching is at every level: it's about teaching.”

“The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed.”

“History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.”

“The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”

“You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise.”

“I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.”

“This country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date.. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.”

“The best thing about getting older is knowing history. The longer you live, the longer you have been in a sport, the more you know, and the more you know where things started.”

“Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would yield every honor which has been accorded by war.”

“The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.”

“One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.”

“History doesn't turn on a dime; it turns on a plugged nickel.”

“Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.”

“I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.”

“We want to be proud when we look back on our history when we grow old.”

“I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.”