86 Inspiring History Quotes

History is a tapestry woven with stories of triumph and tragedy, perseverance and enlightenment. It serves as a powerful reminder of humanity's journey and the indelible lessons etched in time. These lessons, encapsulated in words by philosophers, leaders, and thinkers, continue to inspire and guide us. In this curated collection of 86 inspiring history quotes, we delve into the wisdom of the past to illuminate our present and pave the way for a brighter future. Whether you're a history buff or just seeking a spark of inspiration, these quotes will resonate with the timeless human spirit and encourage us to look to the past as we chart our path forward.

1. “Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own mind, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. And if anyone wants to try to enclose in a small space in a single house or single room, the history of the human spirit and to make it his own, he can only do this in the form of a collection of books.” - Hermann Hesse

2. “In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” - Barack Obama

3. “Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama

4. “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

5. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” - L.P. Hartley

6. “If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.” - Bill Bryson

7. “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” - Vladimir Lenin

8. “This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.” - Victor Hugo

9. “I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me.” - John Wilkes Booth

10. “And eventually in that house where everyone, even the fugitive hiding in the cellar from his faceless enemies, finds his tongue cleaving dryly to the roof of his mouth, where even the sons of the house have to go into the cornfield with the rickshaw boy to joke about whores and compare the length of their members and whisper furtively about dreams of being film directors (Hanif's dream, which horrifies his dream-invading mother, who believes the cinema to be an extension of the brothel business), where life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history, eventually in the murkiness of the underworld he cannot help himself, he finds his eyes straying upwards, up along delicate sandals and baggy pajamas and past loose kurta and above the dupatta, the cloth of modesty, until eyes meet eyes, and then” - Salman Rushdie

11. “Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness]” - Che Guevara

12. “Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.” - Howard Zinn

13. “I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back. (#92 ff.)” - Isaac Asimov

14. “A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.” - Thomas Carlyle

15. “The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.” - Hilary Mantel

16. “It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.” - Karl Marx

17. “So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.” - Tacitus

18. “Geschichte lebt nicht, wenn man ihr keine Heimat im Bewusstsein gibt; sie ist eine Last, die kein freier Mensch zu tragen gezwungen werden kann.” - J.M. Coetzee

19. “It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…” - Vladimir Odoevsky

20. “History is always a grand fantasy... To reconstruct is to invent.” - Eca De Queiroz

21. “What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.” - Barbara Kingsolver

22. “When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.” - Plato

23. “There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.” - Bram Stoker

24. “Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.” - Jonathan D. Spence

25. “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

26. “Selfrighteous creates wars more often than other reasons.” - Toba Beta

27. “There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.” - Neal A. Maxwell

28. “He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope's pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life." ” - R. Bosworth Smith

29. “Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.” - Christopher Hitchens

30. “History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.” - Patricia Hampl

31. “We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.” - Maggie O'Farrell

32. “You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.” - David McCullough

33. “Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.” - Hannah Arendt

34. “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

35. “History is an angel being blown backwards into the future” - Laurie Anderson

36. “There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.” - Robert Massie

37. “His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.” - Patrick White

38. “Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.” - Isabel Allende

39. “A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.” - Ruth Reichl

40. “History, lie of our lives, mire of our loins. Our sins, our souls. Hiss-tih-ree: the tip of the pen taking a trip of three steps (with one glide) down the chronicle to trap a slick, sibilant character. Hiss. (Ss.) Tih. Ree.He was a pig, a plain pig, in the morning, standing five feet ten on one hoof. He was a pig in slacks. He was a pig in school. He was a pig on the dotted line. But in my eyes it’s always the ones signing dotted lines that become pigs.Did this pig have a precursor? He did, indeed he did. In point of fact, dating all the way back to the Biblical Age. Oh where? About everywhere you look there's pigs giving that fancy ol’ snake a chase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can always count on a fuckin’ pretentious sarcastican for a fancy prose style.” - Brian Celio

41. “I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.” - Cassandra Clare

42. “All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.” - Quentin Crisp

43. “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

44. “The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.” - Howard Zinn

45. “Remove yourself, sir!” - David McCullough

46. “History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.” - Malcolm X

47. “It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast betweenthe standards of the past and the standards of the present. Somefulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.” - Norman Davies

48. “Madre de piedra, espuma de los cóndores.Alto arrecife de la aurora humana.Pala perdida en la primera arena.” - Pablo Neruda

49. “Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.” - Wilfred Owen

50. “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

51. “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

52. “The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.” - Michael Findley

53. “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” - Victor Hugo

54. “Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history” - Gregory Maguire

55. “For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.” - Tahir Shah

56. “Cuanto más codiciado por el mercado mundial, mayor es la desgracia que un producto trae consigo al pueblo latinoamericano que, con su sacrificio, lo crea.” - Eduardo Galeano

57. “Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings? My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me. The young king [crown prince Henry, †1183] and the count of Britanny [prince Geoffrey, †1186] sleep in dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to be irremediably tormented by the memory of the dead. Two sons remain to my solace, who today survive to punish me, miserable and condemned. King Richard [the Lionheart] is held in chains [in captivity with Emperor Henry VI of Germany]. His brother, John, depletes his kingdom with iron [the sword] and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord has turned cruel to me and attacked me with the harshness of his hand. Truly his wrath battles against me: my sons fight amongst themselves, if it is a fight where where one is restrained in chains, the other, adding sorrow to sorrow, undertakes to usurp the kingdom of the exile by cruel tyranny. Good Jesus, who will grant that you protect me in hell and hide me until your fury passes, until the arrows which are in me cease, by which my whole spirit is sucked out?"[Third letter to Pope Celestine (1193)]” - Eleanor of Aquitaine

58. “History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.” - Julian Barnes

59. “No mi kršćani upućeni smo po središtu našega Creda - 'mučen pod Poncijem Pilatom' - u povijest u kojoj je bilo razapinjanja i mučenja, u kojoj se plakalo i tako rijetko ljubilo. I nikakav od povijesti udaljeni mit, nikakav Platonovi idejni Bog, nikakva gnostička soteriologija i nikakav apstraktni govor o povijesnosti naše egzistencije ne mogu nam vratiti onu nedužnost koju smo u toj povijesti izgubili.” - Johann Baptist Metz

60. “Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”“You deserved it.” - Priya Ardis

61. “If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.” - Robert Earl Lee

62. “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

63. “The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.” - G.K. Chesterton

64. “Always do what you're afraid to do"-Robert F. Kennedy” - Evan Thomas

65. “When men follow justice the city blooms, the earth bears rich harvests, and children and flocks increase; but for the unjust all nature is hostile, the people waste away from famine, and a whole city may reap the evil fruit of one man's ill deeds.” - Christopher Henry Dawson

66. “Our own story is even more important for us to know than history.” - Kristin Cashore

67. “History loved to lie, through simple distortion or complete fabrication. Lies were the cosmetics of history, and when history could not be beautiful, it preferred to be shocking.” - Sean DeLauder

68. “When Lytle was born, the Wright Brothers had not yet achieved a working design. When he died, Voyager 2 was exiting the solar system. What does one do with the coexistence of those details in a lifetime’s view? It weighed on him.” - John Jeremiah Sullivan

69. “Ought we not to look upon our own history as being at least as full of God, as full of His goodness and of His truth, as much a proof of His faithfulness and veracity, as the lives of any of the saints who have gone before? We do our Lord an injustice when we suppose that He wrought all His mighty acts, and showed Himself strong for those in the early time, but doth not perform wonders or lay bare His arm for the saints who are now upon the earth.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

70. “The difference between the past and the present is that individual freedom and security no longer fall to be protected solely through the D vehicle of common-law maxims and presumptions which may be altered or repealed by statute, but are now protected by entrenched constitutional provisions which neither the Legislature nor the Executive may abridge. It would accordingly be improper for us to hold constitutional a system which, as Sachs J has noted, confers on creditors the power to consign the person of an impecunious debtor to prison at will and without the interposition at the crucial time of a judicial officer.” - Pius Langa

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

72. “In Scandanavia, 'Iverson finds that the whole spectrum of pollen deposits is altered when (in early Neolithic times) ... the first farmers appear. Cereal pollens increase. Plants of oak woodland lessen and disappear; birch pollen increases rapidly -- it is one of the trees which can come in after an extensive burn. For the pollen record, the effect of early agriculture is as severe as a shift in climate.” - Russell Lord

73. “Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.” - David Mitchell

74. “It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.” - Julius Evola

75. “The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it.” - C.L. Gammon

76. “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

77. “This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.” - Markham Shaw Pyle

78. “Progress is hard on history.” - Justina Chen Headley

79. “What’s the good of glory, magnificent renown, if in its flow it steams away to nothing?” - Oedipus

80. “History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.” - Heather Anastasiu

81. “The pond garden is an intricate phenomenon coalescing the intent and will of various people of influence living at various times.” - Norris Brock Johnson

82. “History is fiction.” - Jennifer Donnelly

83. “One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed... When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” - HEGEL

84. “Hitler is the rare individual who really did make history - specifically he made it worse.” - John Green

85. “Those that aspire to raise their head above the crowd are most likely to have it shot off.” - Leif Herrgesell

86. “I had read history too closely, read of Caesar and the Roman Empire. I had not noticed that in the books there were white spaces between each line; the white spaces are there to remind you of the unspoken, unwritten truth. When one only reads the words and does not read what is not written in the book, then one will never learn to understand.” - Erik Christian Haugaard