History Quotes

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

As soon as it becomes possible, by dint of a strong will, to overthrow the entire past of the world, then, in a single moment, we will join the ranks of independent gods. World history for us will then be nothing but a dreamlike otherworldly being.

We cannot help but see Socrates as the turning-point, the vortex of world history.

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated, and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed. History treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

The truly great haters in the world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

During the longest period of the human past nothing was more terrible than to feel that one stood by oneself. To be alone, to experience things by oneself, neither to obey nor to rule, to be an individual-that was not a pleasure but a punishment; one was sentenced to individuality.

Perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility.

The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people.

It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do.

Blood alone literally moves the wheels of history.

Thirty centuries of history allow us to look with supreme pity on certain doctrines which are preached beyond the Alps by the descendants of those who were illiterate when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.

The history of many saints, beatified by the church, is repugnant. It shows nothing more than a profound aberration of the human spirit in search of ultra-terrestrial chimeras.

We deny the existence of two classes, because there are many more than two classes. We deny that human history can be explained in terms of economics. We deny your internationalism. That is a luxury article which only the elevated can practise, because peoples are passionately bound to their native soil.

Strip malls are history.

Work hard, have fun, make history.

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.

I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg.

This is something that I deeply, deeply regret. Darkening your face, regardless of the context or circumstances, is always unacceptable because of the racist history of blackface.

The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

At News Corporation, we have a history of challenging media orthodoxies.