history
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘history’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies.” -Dean Acheson
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“The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.” -Margaret Fuller
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“I know there’s some kind of history to mountain music-like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition.” -Loretta Lynn
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“In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.” -Jesse Jackson
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“We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.” -Fred Allen
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“I’m not keen on history being tampered with… to any extent.” -Daniel Day-Lewis
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“I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.” -John Cleese
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“You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.” -David Hockney
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“It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.” -Audre Lorde
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“My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.” -Russell Banks
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“The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.” -Simon Wiesenthal
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“The oppressed peoples can liberate themselves only through struggle. This is a simple and clear truth confirmed by history.” -Kim Il-sung
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“It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.” -Neale Donald Walsch
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“All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.” -Neil Armstrong
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“And I can tell you that history will back up what I’m about to say and that is that there is no government run by conservatives, Republicans, put whoever you want there, if you give government the opportunity to spend more money than it has, it will do it. It will do it every time.”…
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“The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.” -David Hume
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“The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.” -Brian Eno
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“Isn’t history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?” -Emile M. Cioran
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“I am totally fascinated by people and our history as I understand and continue to explore it. People have so much to give and so far to go and yet we have given and gone a great distance. It’s really just interesting to ask: why not? And see where that takes me.” -Nikki Giovanni
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“I don’t have incredible knowledge about films or of filmmaking history I’m not that kind of person.” -Ang Lee
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“All I know is that history repeats itself and people are going to want to experience the world. But I know then they are going to have a better appreciation for what is here in Maine.” -John Baldacci
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“Gluttony might be innocuous were it not for the fact that gluttons tend to disregard whether their self-serving behaviors harm anyone else. We don’t need to look far and wide to find examples of gluttonous behavior, as they are numerous throughout the history of capitalism.” -Simon Mainwaring
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“The subject of history is the gradual realization of all that is practically necessary.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“I really like to look like a history book. I can look 1940s, I can look 1970s hippie-chic, or sometimes I’ll pull that ’80s Brooklyn hip-hop kid with the door-knocker earrings.” -Katy Perry
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“You can’t walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.” -Peter Abrahams
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“Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.” -George Lucas
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“The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there’s only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.” -Jimmy Carter
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“May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that ‘faith’ is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?” -W. H. Auden
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“The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting…
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“You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don’t love themselves enough.” -Tom Hiddleston
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“You can’t fake this music. You might be a great singer or a great musician but, in the need, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s how you connect to the songs and to the history behind them.” -Etta James
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“All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science.” -Leslie Fiedler
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“And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.” -David Icke
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“In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.” -Edward de Bono
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“That’s all a man can hope for during his lifetime – to set an example – and when he is dead, to be an inspiration for history.” -William McKinley
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“There’s something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.” -Tim Burton
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“Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.” -Cat Stevens
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“History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed art has remembered the people, because they created.” -William Morris
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“Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.” -Madalyn Murray O’Hair
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“It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” -Woodrow Wilson
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“History takes time. History makes memory.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!” -Nikita Khrushchev
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“And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.” -Carter G. Woodson
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“It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.” -Elie Wiesel
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“The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.” -Emma Goldman
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“I was bused to a school in Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn in 1972. I was one of the first black kids in the history of the school.” -Chris Rock
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“Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead.” -Marty Meehan
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“All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” -Charles A. Beard
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“I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.” -Martin Scorsese
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“I love doing normal things – movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths – that’s a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.” -Christina Aguilera
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“My place in history will depend on what I can do for the people and not on what the people can do for me.” -William Jennings Bryan
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“I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.” -Tim Robbins
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“History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Yeah, I read history. But it doesn’t make you nice. Hitler read history, too.” -Joan Rivers
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“We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.” -Paul Ryan
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“I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, ‘the ability to conceive failure as progress.’” -Jerry Saltz
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“I didn’t do improv in college, I never performed, I didn’t do theater either. I was in student government, I was a history major.” -Demetri Martin
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“No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.” -Alfred North Whitehead
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“History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” -Malcom X
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“I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.” -Kanye West
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“The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.” -Golda Meir
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“The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.” -Franz Kafka
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“History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions.” -Ken Burns
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“There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.” -Michelle Obama
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“I think the materialist conception of history is valid.” -Christopher Hitchens
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“Value people on their potential, not on their history.” -Bo Bennett
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“The history of the last century shows, as we shall see later, that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally.” -Carroll Quigley
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“Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“Their memory’s like a train: you can see it getting smaller as it pulls away And the things you can’t remember Tell the things you can’t forget that History puts a saint in every dream.” -Tom Waits
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“In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.” -Newt Gingrich
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“History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.” -Theodor Adorno
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“Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.” -Norman Borlaug
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“History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.” -Joseph Conrad
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“In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.” -Desmond Tutu
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“I don’t think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.” -Richard M. Nixon
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“Human history in essence is the history of ideas.” -H. G. Wells
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“I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.” -George W. Bush
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“The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.” -Benito Mussolini
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“We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.” -Doug Coupland
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“In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.” -James Hillman
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“The main thing is to make history, not to write it.” -Otto von Bismarck
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“The majority see the obstacles the few see the objectives history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former.” -Alfred A. Montapert
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“If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!” -William Makepeace Thackeray
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“Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.” -David Brinkley
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“Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“All history is incomprehensible without Christ.” -Ernest Renan
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“Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.” -Lyndon B. Johnson
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“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.” -Mason Cooley
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“We have nothing in our history or position to invite aggression we have everything to beckon us to the cultivation of relations of peace and amity with all nations.” -Franklin P. Adams
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“Completeness? Happiness? These words don’t come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.” -Anita Baker
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“Inflation is bringing us true democracy. For the first time in history, luxuries and necessities are selling at the same price.” -Robert Orben
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“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.” -Simone Weil
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“I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn’t often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.” -Steven Spielberg
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“Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.” -Robert Hall
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“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.” -Walter Scott
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“Without question, the Red Ryder BB gun is the most important gun in the history of American weaponry.” -Ted Nugent
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“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” -Virginia Woolf
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“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.” -Thomas Huxley
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“I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.” -John Burroughs
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“If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that’s what it’s all about.” -Carlos Santana
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“I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.” -Friedrich August von Hayek
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“Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.” -Jacques Yves Cousteau
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“I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.” -Quentin Tarantino
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“There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.” -Ansel Adams
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“History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.” -Clarence Darrow
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“The people who have really made history are the martyrs.” -Aleister Crowley
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“No man is truly great who is great only in his lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.” -William Hazlitt
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“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.” -Eric Hoffer
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“Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.” -Robert Mugabe
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“A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections.” -Washington Irving
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“There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” -Harry S. Truman
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“Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.” -Henry A. Kissinger
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“The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.” -Dan Quayle
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“I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‘See, you did it yourself.’” -Alice Walker
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“While we are living in the present, we must celebrate life every day, knowing that we are becoming history with every work, every action, every deed.” -Mattie Stepanek
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“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.” -Janeane Garofalo
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“I know that many of you do wear such a cross of Christ, not in any ostentatious way, not in a way that might harm you at your work or recreation, but a simple indication that you value the role of Jesus Christ in the history of the world, that you are trying to live…
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“In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.” -Alan Watts
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“I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.” -John Henrik Clarke
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“Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.” -John Dewey
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“For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.” -Louis L’Amour
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“Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore we must be saved by faith.” -Reinhold Niebuhr
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“If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.” -E. O. Wilson
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“Beating Pakistan is always special because they are a tough team and we have a bit if a history regarding Pakistan.” -Sachin Tendulkar
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“The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.” -Henry Miller
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“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.” -Samuel Butler
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“We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.” -Charles Bukowski
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“If you think you have it tough, read history books.” -Bill Maher
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“I’m not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.” -Richard Dawkins
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“The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal.” -David Brin
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“I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me.” -Brian Clough
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“Well, I think that California has had a history of always spending more money than it takes in.” -Arnold Schwarzenegger
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“The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we’d have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.” -William J. Clinton
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“The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.” -Arthur C. Clarke
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“History shows that there are no invincible armies.” -Joseph Stalin
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“History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.” -Anatole France
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“It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.” -Molly Ivins
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“A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.” -Grandma Moses
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“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” -C. Wright Mills
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“I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.” -Colin Powell
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“Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I’m not even sure we can draw lessons from them.” -P. J. O’Rourke
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“All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.” -Honore de Balzac
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“Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.” -Haile Selassie
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“Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don’t any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.” -Chuck Palahniuk
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“It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.” -Malcolm Forbes
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“We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” -R. D. Laing
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“Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule.” -Jefferson Davis
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“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” -Francis Bacon
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“Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
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“Strangers are exciting, their mystery never ends. But, there’s nothing like looking at your own history in the faces of your friends.” -Ani DiFranco
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“I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It’s not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It’s the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is ‘Delete.’” -Elayne Boosler
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“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.” -Babatunde Olatunji
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“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.” -Benjamin Disraeli
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“Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.” -James A. Baldwin
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“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” -Arnold J. Toynbee
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“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.” -Milton Friedman
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“Today, for the first time in history, a Bishop of Rome sets foot on English soil. This fair land, once a distant outpost of the pagan world, has become, through the preaching of the Gospel, a beloved and gifted portion of Christ’s vineyard.” -Pope John Paul II
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“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” -Rudyard Kipling
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“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.” -George Eliot
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“The future is not Big Government. Self-serving politicians. Powerful bureaucrats. This has been tried, tested throughout history. The result has always been disaster. President Obama, your agenda is not new. It’s not change, and it’s not hope.” -Rush Limbaugh
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“If you have autism in the family history, you still vaccinate. Delay it a bit, space them out.” -Temple Grandin
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“The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.” -Ambrose Bierce
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“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.” -Karl Marx
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“This is a moment in history where it is almost hard to catch your breath.” -Hillary Clinton
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“History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.” -Thomas Carlyle
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“Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.” -Margaret Mead
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“Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?” -Carl Jung
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“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.” -Richard P. Feynman
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“We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they’ve got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.” -Timothy Leary
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“If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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