119 Inspiring History Quotes

Journeying through the annals of history, we uncover tales of triumph, endurance, and wisdom that continue to inspire and shape our present. Whether you're a history enthusiast, a student seeking motivation, or simply someone fascinated by the legacies of the past, this carefully curated collection of 119 inspiring history quotes offers valuable insights and perspectives. These quotes capture the essence of human experience across centuries and serve as a testament to the enduring spirit that drives us forward. Join us as we explore the profound words of leaders, thinkers, and visionaries whose reflections remind us of the power of history to illuminate the future.

1. “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” - George Orwell

2. “The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.” - Robert A. Heinlein

3. “The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.” - Shelby Foote

4. “Son, you can't go around painting yourself black, you hear?" "Why not, Papa?" "Because they'll take you away." "Why?" "Because you shouldn't want to be like black people or Jewish people or anyone who is...not us." "Who are Jewish people?" "You know my oldest customer, Mr. Kaufmann? Where we bought your shoes?" "Yes." "Well, he's Jewish." "I didn't know that. Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a license?" ..... "...you've got beautiful blond hair and big safe blue eyes. You should be happy with that; is that clear?” - Markus Zusak

5. “We learn from history that we don't learn from history!” - Desmond Tutu

6. “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” - Winston S. Churchill

7. “There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.” - Chuck Palahniuk

8. “Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again.” - Robert Coover

9. “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” - Frederic Bastiat

10. “Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.” - Grover Cleveland

11. “Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.” - Vladimir Lenin

12. “I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.” - Michael Collins

13. “Sir, I shall not defeat you - I shall transcend you.” - Benjamin Disraeli

14. “History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.” - Clarence Darrow

15. “That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.” - David Foster Wallace

16. “Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.” - Arnold Toynbee

17. “Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.” - Victor Hugo

18. “With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.” - Peter Weiss

19. “Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.” - Jacques Barzun

20. “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” - Willa Cather

21. “Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos.” - Neal Stephenson

22. “The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.” - Edith Hamilton

23. “From the ethical point of view, no one can escape responsibility with the excuse that he is only an individual, on whom the fate of the world does not depend. Not only can this not be known objectively for certain, because it is always possible that it will depend precisely on the individual, but this kind of thinking is also made impossible by the very essence of ethics, by conscience and the sense of responsibility.” - Georg Lukacs

24. “God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.” - Ambrose Bierce

25. “Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.” - Jennifer Donnelly

26. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” - James Baldwin

27. “Their lives were precarious and they knew it. They were trying their best to fit themselves into a country which would never quite accept them, and to make themselves acceptable in a part of the world where their intrusion was resented in the vain hope that thus their establishments might endure ... The Orient remained strange and hostile. Unfamiliar diseases abounded. No one could be trusted. There was never security or peace for long. In any alley-way an assassin might be lurking, sent down from the Old Man of the Mountain. At any moment the lord might have to rise from his couch to ride out against enemy raiders. At any moment his lady might find herself in charge of the defence of her castle. At any moment the festivities might be interrupted by the sound of the infidel mangonels pounding against the walls. Life was merry, but it was short; and when the crisis came there was no lack of gallantry among the lords and ladies of Outremer. They had tasted with relish the gracious things of life; and they faced their doom with pride and resolution.” - Steven Runciman

28. “If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary?” - Brigid Pasulka

29. “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” - Dan Brown

30. “The historian is a prophet looking backwards.” - Friedrich Von Schlegel

31. “Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” - Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

32. “Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.” - Sarah Vowell

33. “The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed... Like thief in the night, aliens invade human. Chaos happens prior to the new order of coexistence. The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed.” - Toba Beta

34. “There were three things sought by invaders who crossed oceans to discover America. Those were gold, gospel, glory. There are four things sought by aliens who crossed heavens to discover planet earth. Those are gold, gospel, glory, gene.” - Toba Beta

35. “It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).” - Lauro Martines

36. “The ages live in history through their anachronisms.” - Oscar Wilde

37. “It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.” - Abraham Lincoln

38. “Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.” - Will Tuttle

39. “Sing, boy! sing! The ages are waiting for you. Sing! sing! All the world will hear you. God knows what will come of it.” - Charles Carleton Coffin

40. “The following is a list of statements made many years ago by experts in their fields. At the time they were said they sounded intelligent. With the passing of time, they sound idiotic.” - Sean Covey

41. “In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass's home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench...” - Bernice L. McFadden

42. “The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: 'This is not who we are.' But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide's eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are.” - Sarah Vowell

43. “For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.” - Sarah Vowell

44. “The drinking dens are spilling outThere's staggering in the squareThere's lads and lasses falling aboutAnd a crackling in the airDown around the dungeon doorsThe shelters and the queuesEverybody's looking forSomebody's arms to fall intoAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThere's frost on the graves and the monumentsBut the taverns are warm in townPeople curse the governmentAnd shovel hot food downThe lights are out in the city hallThe castle and the keepThe moon shines down upon it allThe legless and asleepAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the wagons creeping throughCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThe garrison sleeps in the citadelWith the ghosts and the ancient stonesHigh up on the parapetA Scottish piper stands aloneAnd high on the windThe highland drums begin to rollAnd something from the past just comesAnd stares into my soulAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the Caledonian BluesCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowWhat it isIt's what it is nowThere's a chink of light, there's a burning wickThere's a lantern in the towerWee Willie Winkie with a candlestickStill writing songs in the wee wee hoursOn Charlotte Street I takeA walking stick from my hotelThe ghost of Dirty DickIs still in search of Little NellAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowOh what it isWhat it is now” - Mark Knopfler

45. “A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.” - Robert A. Heinlein

46. “It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.” - Timothy B. Tyson

47. “You have to know the past to understand the present.” - Carl Sagan

48. “We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.” - Steven C. Rockefeller

49. “News is only the first rough draft of history.” - Alan Barth

50. “What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.” - Christopher Hitchens

51. “I am the keeper of my husband's history.” - Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

52. “We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.” - Sonia Johnson

53. “There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.” - Michael Gruber

54. “Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.” - Julian Barnes

55. “Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.” - Christopher Henry Dawson

56. “Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.” - Diana Abu-Jaber

57. “What really happened doesn't matter. What matters is how we agree to remember it.” - Leila Sales

58. “Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.” - Beck

59. “A menudo se usa la historia como una serie de cuentos morales para aumentar la solidaridad de grupo o, cosa más defendible, según mi punto de vista, para explicar el desarrollo de instituciones importantes como los parlamentos y conceptos como la democracia y de ese modo la enseñanza del pasado se ha convertido en algo fundamental a la hora de debatir la forma de inculcar y trasmitir valores. El peligro es que ese objetivo, que puede ser admirable, acabe por distorsionar la historia, ya sea convirtiéndola en un relato simplista en el cual sólo hay blanco y negro, o bien representándola como si todo tendiese hacia una sola dirección, ya sea el progreso humano o el triunfo de un grupo en particular. La historia explicada de este modo aplana la complejidad de la experiencia humana y no deja espacio para las distintas interpretaciones del pasado.” - Margaret MacMillan

60. “Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

61. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” - Julian Barnes

62. “It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.” - Thomas Pynchon

63. “He led her back to the house, the perfume from the acacia clinging to her. The djinn was supposed to live in the scent of the acacia blossom, making themselves visible only to the young in order to entrap them in otherworldly world.” - Nadeem Aslam

64. “I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.” - Sherman Alexie

65. “I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.” - Anatole France

66. “Either that information was not believed or inexplicably never passed on to the regional military command. When the attack finally came, Vienamese civilians were defenseless.” - Nayan Chanda

67. “In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.” - Philip Jenkins

68. “Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.” - Gregory Maguire

69. “Es el hombre vivo lo que hay que buscar bajo el polvo de los archivos y en el silencio de los museos.” - Georges Duby

70. “Patterns repeat themselves in history” - Rick Riordan

71. “Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.” - Terry Pratchett

72. “You can't really move forward until you look back.[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]” - Cornel West

73. “It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,” - Gertrude Stein

74. “Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.” - William L. Shirer

75. “I mean, I don't know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I've had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern generals with their tawny mustaches and beards, and hair in ringlets, on horseback. And those beautiful girls in crinoline and pantalettes. You would never know that they ever fucked, from all you're able to read." She paused and squeezed my hand. "I mean, doesn't it just do something to you to think of one of those ravishing girls with that crinoline all in a fabulous tangle, and one of those gorgeous young officers—I mean, both of them fucking like crazy?""Oh yes," I said with a shiver, "oh yes, it does. It enlarges one's sense of history.” - William Styron

76. “History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.” - John Green

77. “My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” - Elie Wiesel

78. “Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.” - Nick Harkaway

79. “كانت المساحة مفتوحة لنا و لغيرناالحق يقال إن السادات قد أزال العوائق أمام الحركة الإسلامية، و لكنه - و للإنصاف و الأمانة أيضا- لم يضع أي عوائق أمام الآخرين كي يعملواا و ينشطوا في الساحة...السادات كان ذكيا في إدراكه و معرفته بالمجتمع المصري المتدين المحب للإسلام، و كان على ثقة بانه لو أزال تلك العوائق التي كانت أمام الإسلاميين فسوف يجرف تيارهم جميع التيارات الأخرى” - عبد المنعم أبوالفتوح

80. “I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl," he wrote. "You must expect to give yourself up when you come." For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself open.” - Erik Larson

81. “Where humanitysowed faith, hope, and unity, joy’s garden blossomed.” - Aberjhani

82. “And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.” - Stacy Schiff

83. “Even for the most excitable preacher, there was nothing inherently sinful about a waffle.” - Simon Schama

84. “He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.” - George Eliot

85. “The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.” - Jill Lepore

86. “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” - Ariel Durant

87. “Considering the comparative lifespans of simpler tribal societies and that of the more advanced agri-urban empires of antiquity, even here in the New World, it would be possible, indeed, to make out quite a case for illiteracy as a factor of the safety in keeping population and essential supplies in a working balance, with little or no damage to the basic sources of renewal.” - Russell Lord The Care of the Earth a History of Husbandry

88. “Do you think we can be friends?” I asked.He stared up at the ceiling. “Probably not, but we can pretend.” - Priya Ardis

89. “You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)...I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world…It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.” - Rosalind Franklin

90. “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.” - Niall Ferguson

91. “It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.” - Randall Wallace

92. “Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern.” - Charles W. Carey Jr.

93. “It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.” - Anna Quindlen

94. “Experience teaches is such a lovely saying. However, when people try not to make the mistakes of what history and experience has taught, they are criticized for it. They are told that because they have not experienced it, they cannot appreciate it, and thus never know it. However, at the same time, people want you to learn from past mistakes and past experiences, in order to make a better choice for yourself. So let me ask you, which is the hypocrite? Is it history or is it today?” - Lionel Suggs

95. “In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

96. “At one time he [Cornelius Vanderbilt] personally controlled some 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.” - Bill Bryson

97. “Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity.” - Bill Bryson

98. “Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself” - Pierre Nora

99. “The Al Saud believe they have an asset more powerful than the ballot box: they have Allah.” - Karen Elliott House

100. “Next time!" In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come?” - Helen Hunt Jackson

101. “History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena.” - Kami Garcia

102. “The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” - Michel-Rolph Trouillot

103. “Most of [her ashes] fell into the river in a long gray curtain. But some was caught by the wind and blown upward toward the blue spring sky where it swirled a moment in the air, before dissolving into sunlight.” - Kimberly Cutter

104. “examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.” - Gregory B. Sadler

105. “Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they looked like this. But that's how we're going to remember them. Our alabaster past. When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect.” - Julia David Levithan

106. “English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.” - Peter Prasad

107. “Why did she want to stay in England? Because the history she was interested in had happened here, and buried deep beneath her analytical mind was a tumbled heap of Englishness in all its glory, or kings and queens, of Runnymede and Shakespeare's London, of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes and Watson rattling off into the fog with cries of 'The game's afoot,' of civil wars bestrewing the green land with blood, of spinning jennies and spotted pigs and Churchill and his country standing small and alone against the might of Nazi Germany. It was a mystery to her how this benighted land had produced so many great men and women, and ruled a quarter of the world and spread its language and law and democracy across the planet.” - Elizabeth Aston

108. “With the development of the printing press, not only could text be mass-produced quickly, it could also be mass-produced quickly and incorrectly.” - The Bureau Chiefs

109. “¿Sería así toda la Historia? ¿La que se aprendía en el colegio? ¿La escrita por los historiadores? Una fabricación más o menos idílica, racional y coherente de lo que en la realidad cruda y dura había sido una caótica y arbitraria mezcla de planes, azares, intrigas, hechos fortuitos, coincidencias, intereses múltiples, que habían ido provocando cambios, trastornos, avances y retrocesos, siempre inesperados y sorprendentes respecto a lo que fue anticipado o vivido por los protagonistas.” - Mario Vargas Llosa

110. “Throughout human history, countries rise and fall. But not America--we continue to rise and rise, like dough, until Jesus bakes us in the fiery Afterscape of the Rapture.” - Stephen Colbert

111. “One day an intrepid sole will climb this mountain on its east side, reaching the summit and the passage that exist between the main peak and secondary peaks, by which he can descend to the west side of the mountain. It is at this site near Lake Brunner, between the main peak and an adjacent stone pyramid, in a "hidden cave" that has been sealed by earthquakes common in the region . . . where lust for Inca gold must end for some . . . but for that intrepid sole . . . it shall be just the beginning!” - Steven J. Charbonneau

112. “It is your duty,' he said, 'to recover your country not by gold but by the sword. You will be fighting with all you love before your eyes: the temples of the gods, your wives and children, the soil of your native land scarred with the ravages of war, and everything which honor and truth call upon you to defend, or recover, or avenge.” - Livy

113. “The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.” - Frederick Buechner

114. “This boy was likely to die soon, but he died yesterday - because of a doctor's arrogance, his unwillingness to seek a consult, his neglect to get a full and thorough history. Arrogance! We are clinicians, scientists. We observe time-honored procedures and analyses - that's how we are trained. And this is what happens when we subjugate that training to arrogance!” - Dr. Hooten Monday Mornings

115. “What you should do," she told Fat during one of his darker hours, "is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34." Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.” - Philip K. Dick

116. “What history will say about us is of no importance; because we will be gone when the history judges about us.” - Mehmet Murat ildan

117. “Everything which made Abraham Lincoln the loved and honored man he was, it is in the power of the humblest American boy to imitate.” - New York Times April 19 1865

118. “Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.” - Tom Hiddleston

119. “التاريخ يعيد نفسه مرة أو مرتين لكن التليفزيون ألف مرة” - أنيس منصور