Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

History is a confused heap of facts.

History is philosophy learned from examples.

All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

How many pens are broken, how many ink bottles consumed, to write about things that have never happened.

The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.

The function of posterity is to look after itself.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.

History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.

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

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say?

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.

France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.