History Quotes - Page 18

We've removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams.

If I'm going to Hell, I'm going there playing the piano.

The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.

The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

History is, indeed, an argument without end.

Hitler, who founded the Third Reich, who ruled it ruthlessly and often with uncommon shrewdness, who led it to such dizzy heights and such a sorry end, was a person of undoubted, if evil genius. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had molded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.

Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.

The wisest fool in Christendom.

[Hitler thought] that Mussolini was no figure of world history, like der Fuehrer or Stalin.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

The search for causes must come after the collection of facts.

Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.

The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.

I think the most un-American thing you can say is, 'You can't say that.'

Every past is worth condemning.

Science, history and politics are not suited for discussion except by experts. Others are simply in the position of requiring more information; and, till they have acquired all available information, cannot do anything but accept on authority the opinions of those better qualified.

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

A person's genetic endowment, a product of the evolution of the species, is said to explain part of the workings of his mind and his personal history the rest.

The more you look back into English history, the more you are forced to the conclusion that alongside civility and the deeply held convictions about individual rights, the English have a natural taste for disorder.