“I want to go down in history.”
History is not just names and dates — it is the story of how we got here and a warning about where we might be headed. These quotes look at the past with curiosity, respect, and the awareness that those who ignore it tend to repeat it.
“World War II ended the Great Depression with one of the great public-private industrial collaborations in the history of man.”
“I want to go down in history.”
“This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?”
“History is the science of things which are not repeated.”
“Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.”
“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducted from it.”
“History is more or less bunk.”
“I am privileged to be a citizen of the single greatest society in all of human history.”
“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.”
“If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.”
“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.”
“War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Cameramen are among the most extraordinarily able and competent people I know. They have to have an insight into natural history that gives them a sixth sense of what the creature is going to do, so they can be ready to follow.”
“If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.”