History Quotes

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

History would be an excellent thing if only it were true.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

Darwin has interested us in the history of nature's technology.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to 'teleology' in the natural sciences, but their rational meaning is empirically explained.

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.

The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare upon the living.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

The entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Money plays the largest part in determining the course of history.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

The child ever dwells in the mystery of ageless time, unobscured by the dust of history.

A small group of determined and like-minded people can change the course of history.

History supplied numerous instances to prove that brute force is as nothing before soul-force.