History Quotes - Page 37

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.

The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they are and will be innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by them can be employed only through further acts.

A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.

The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

History is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.

I'm the ultimately responsible person in this organization. Other people can pass the buck to me, but I can't pass the buck to anyone else.

Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.

Every thought is an afterthought.

In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

No generation can escape history.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Journalism is merely history's first draft.

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.

A lack of the historical sense is the hereditary fault of all philosophers.

History belongs above all to the man...who needs models, teachers, comforters and cannot find them among his contemporaries.

For many parts of Nature can neither be invented with sufficient subtlety, nor demonstrated with sufficient perspicuity, nor accommodated unto use with sufficient dexterity, without the aid and intervening of the mathematics, of which sort are perspective, music, astronomy, cosmography, architecture, engineery, and divers others.

History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.