“To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.”
Topic
history
951 quotes
Quotes, most loved first
“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.”
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
“There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.”
“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”
“History does nothing it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.”
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
“The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.”
“The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.”
“De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.”
“I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.”
“Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.”
“Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.”
“The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.”
“Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”
“The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.”
“Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?”
“The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice their choice!”
“The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.”
“Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.”
“People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.”
“Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.”
“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”
“Assassination has never changed the history of the world.”