History Quotes - Page 52

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

What finally scuppered Napoleon's Europe was of course the fatal combination of the English Channel and the Russian winter; the same unlikely partnership that also did for Hitler's Europe.

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

I almost never do anything for Black History Month, because I feel it's just another way to separate us.

The real history does not get written, because it is not in people's brains but in their nerves and vitals.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.

Pearl Harbor is strenuously respectful of contemporary sensitivities, sometimes at the cost of accuracy.

We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.

It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.

Bound as our lives are to the tyranny of time, it is through what we know of history that we are delivered from our bonds and escape - into time.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

Rather an end in horror, than horror without end. He could not condemn principles he might need to invoke and apply later. The wolf cannot help having been created by God as he is, but we shoot him all the same if we have to. The great player in diplomacy, as in chess, asks the question,Does this improve me?, not look at the possible fringe benefits If you can't have what you like, you must like what you have.

Not a single other creature in all the history of the world has been just as ourselves. Not another will be like us.

The United States may have retained more of the intellectual imprint of the British 18th century than Britain itself.

Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. We patch and tinker more than we renew. The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it.

Is not that state a warning and a judgment for our heavy sins as a nation?

None but blockheads copy each other.

Let valour end my life!

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.