History quotes
1.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside history — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The Middle Ages were an era of mysticism, ruled by blind faith and blind obedience to the dogma that faith is superior to reason. The Renaissance was specifically the rebirth of reason, the liberation of man's mind, the triumph of rationality over mysticism - a faltering, incomplete, but impassioned triumph that led to the birth of science, of individualism, of freedom."
"Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right."
"History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought."
"In analysing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial."
"The truly strong and sound mind is the mind that can embrace equally great things and small."
"History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions."
"All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune-make for a finer, nobler type of manhood."
"History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is."
"History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born."
"Every thought is an afterthought."
"When confronted by a hungry wolf, it is unwise to goad the beast, as Cato would have us do. But it is equally unwise to imagine the snarling animal a friend and offer your hand, as Pompey does." "Perhaps you would have us climb a tree!"
"Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child."
"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."
"Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer."
"The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival."
"I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today."
"It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition."
"History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries."
"A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers."
"Inventors and geniuses have almost always been looked on as no better than fools at the beginning of their career, and very frequently at the end of it also."
