History Quotes

Shakespeare in Love... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent.

Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.

The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.

And me, myself personally, in order for there to be any kind of longevity there's gotta be some history.

World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.

We've been a country that's been fortunate to be protected by two oceans, to not have serious attacks on our territory for most of our history. And we were unfortunately reminded in a very devastating way of our vulnerability.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

The myth that the founding of American Republic was based on the philosophy of John Locke could only have been maintained, because the history of Leibniz's influence was suppressed.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history.

Let me say that I think the economic history of the last 150 years clearly shows that if you want to industrialize a country in a short period, let us say 20 years, and you don't have a well-developed private sector, entrepreneurial class, then central planning is important.

You're going to relegate my history to a month.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

I'm really excited to be a part of it and sharing the legacy, any documentary I look up at the sky and Kevin Burns did and Bryan did and showed me again you know the history that's in this character and you know.

Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.

Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will.

It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.

During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history.

It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.

I don't think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that's now history.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

The source of wealth is from individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who have happened upon football as a means of serving some hidden agenda.

Those who have heard me speak from time to time know that quite often I cite the observation of that great American author, Mark Twain, who said, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.

Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions?

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.