History Quotes, Quotations, and Sayings

273 History Quotes
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”
Winston Churchill Quotes
“History is written by the victors.”
Winston Churchill Quotes
“History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes”
Mark Twain Quotes
“Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it”
Oscar Wilde Quotes
“Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.”
Mahatma Gandhi Quotes
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge - myth is more potent than history - dreams are more powerful than facts - hope always triumphs over experience - laughter is the cure for grief - love is stronger than death”
Robert Fulghum Quotes
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
Robert Francis Kennedy Quotes
“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”
Oscar Wilde Quotes
“History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”
David C. McCullough Quotes
“Happy is the nation without a history.”
Cesare di Bonesana Beccaria Quotes
Source: Trattato dei Delitti e delle Pene (introduction), (Treatise of Crimes and of Punishment)
“History is a pageant, not a philosophy.”
Augustine Birrell Quotes
Source: Obiter Dicta--The Muse of History
“I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.”
Henry St. John Bolingbroke Quotes
Source: On the Study and Use of History (letter 2)
“The dignity of history.”
Henry St. John Bolingbroke Quotes
Source: On the Study and Use of History (letter V)
“What want these outlaws conquerors should have But History's purchased page to call them great?”
Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron) Quotes
Source: Childe Harold (canto III, st. 48)
“And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.”
Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron) Quotes
Source: Childe Harold (canto IV, st. 108)
“All history is a Bible--a thing stated in words by me more than once.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: quoted in Froude's "Early Life of Carlyle"
“Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Cromwell's Letter and Speeches--Introduction (ch. I)
“History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Essays--On History
“History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Essays--On History
“In a certain sense all men are historians.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Essays--On History
“History, a distillation of rumor.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: French Revolution (pt. I, bk. VII, ch. V)
“All history . . . is an inarticulate Bible.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Latter Day Pamphlets (405)
“Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books.”
Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Source: Life of Frederick the Great (bk. XVI, ch. I)
“What more would you have? He has invented history. [Fr., Que voulez-vous de plus? Il a invente l'histoire.]”
Madame Marie Anne du Deffand Quotes
Source: said of Voltaire, who was accused by critics of lack of invention