History Quotes

History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again. ~ A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood. ~ A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. ~ Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness. ~ The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper Thus violent deeds live after men upon the earth, and traces of war and bloodshed will survive in mournful shapes long after those who worked the desolation are but atoms of earth themselves. ~ The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shrivelled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut. ~ Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte "Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving." ~ Man And Superman by George Bernard Shaw In truth, no men on earth can cheer like Englishmen, who do so rally one another's blood and spirit when they cheer in earnest, that the stir is like the rush of their whole history, with all its standards waving at once, from Saxon Alfred's downwards. ~ Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past. ~ Saint's Progress by John Galsworthy There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes. ~ Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini