They say that history repeats itself, and that it’s important that we learn about the past. There are vital lessons that can impact the future, so with these quotes about history, I hope you can be reminded of our ancestry and equip yourself for success in the future.
Best Quotes on History and Its Repetition
1. If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
2. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
3. Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
4. Life moves fast. As much as you can, learn from your history, you have to move forward.
5. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
6. I’ve been completely fascinated with history because it tells everything about what’s going to happen next because it’s cyclical, everything repeats in general
7. Work hard, have fun and make history.
8. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
9. We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past.
10. Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.
11. Live out of your imagination, not your history.
12. We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
13. The history of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.
14. History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
15. The past changes a little every time we retell it.
16. I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.
17. History is a vast early warning system.
18. We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!
19. To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.
20. Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
21. I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
22. History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
23. Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
24. History speaks to artists. It changes the artist’s thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.
25. History is Philosophy teaching by examples.
26. History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
27. Unlike any other time in our history, we have to know that staying in school and getting an education is the most important thing you can do.
28. Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion — our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.
29. I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense.
30. History is a set of lies agreed upon.
31. There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don’t know anything about, and when I learn about them they’re always fascinating.
32. History should be written as philosophy.
33. A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
34. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
35. History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.
36. If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
37. History passes the final judgment.
38. Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
39. History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
40. And having wisdom with each studious year, in meditation dwelt, with learning wrought, and shaped his weapon with an edge severe, sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer.
41. History provides no precise guidelines.
42. The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
43. History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.
44. If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.
45. History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.
46. To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
47. Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
48. Ideas shape the course of history.
49. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
50. Our history is not our destiny.
51. History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
52. Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.
53. The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
54. The history of liberty is a history of resistance.
55. Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.
56. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
57. If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.
58. My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
59. You cannot amputate your history from your destiny, because that is redemption.
60A page of history is worth a pound of logic.
61. Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
62. History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
63. What I am is a thinking, feeling human being compelled by history.
64. Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
65. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
66. The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
67. The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
68. Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
69. History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
70. If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
71. History is a race between education and catastrophe.
72. It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.
73. The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
74. The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
75. The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
76. I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
77. We are not makers of history. We are made by history
