History Quotes - Page 47

I don't employ Talleyrand when I want a thing done, but only when I want to have the appearance of wanting to do it.

History is the invention of historians.

It is a mark of civilised man that he seeks to understand his traditions, and to criticise them, not to swallow them whole.

The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

We can only know where we're going if we know where we've been.

[H]istory is a melodrama on the theme of parasitism, characterized by scenes that are exciting or dull, as the case may be, and many a sudden stagetrick.

On the breast of that huge Mississippi of falsehood called History, a foam-bell more or less is no consequence.

A Museum of fetishes would give special attention to the history of underwear.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.

It's so damned humiliating.

I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-but for luncheon-for dinner- for tea-for supper-for between meals.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

When Cromwell instructed his portraitist to paint him 'warts and all', he meant both halves of that equation. To teach the warts alone is morbid and unhealthy.

For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities. 


History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time.

The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.

The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been great changes.

I have the right of education. I have the right to play. I have the right to sing. I have the right to talk. I have the right to go to market. I have the right to speak up.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.