History Quotes - Page 27

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equalled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism.

History is full of surprises.

This is a very fickle and faithless generation.

What man is, only his history tells.

Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.

When a liberal is abused, he says, ‘Thank God they didn’t beat me.’ When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn’t kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.

If given the choice between Righteousness and Peace, I choose Righteousness.

I find I like it too much.

But there are advantages to being elected President. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified Top Secret.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down, we don't move; today is today, always is today.

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.

It is in times of difficulty that great nations like great men display the whole energy of their character and become an object of admiration to posterity.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men ... [but] The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story.

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. [...] The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. [...] To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

In fact, the answer to the question "What is mathematics?" has changed several times during the course of history... It was only in the last twenty years or so that a definition of mathematics emerged on which most mathematicians agree: mathematics is the science of patterns.

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

A radiant fellowship of the fallen.

Genius is the ability to see things invisible, to manipulate things intangible, to paint things that have no features

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.