History Quotes

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.

Jesus was the most active resister known to history. His was nonviolence par excellence.

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

We cannot escape history.

It has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes.