130 Famous Quotes About History and Why It Is So Important
Famous and inspiring history quotes on why history is important, making history and how history repeats itself.
While not all of us are eager to study history as a discipline, we are all fascinated when we hear a good story from the past — whether it’s about the way people used to live or how empires were built.
Humans have found ways to leave a trace of their existence — from cave carvings to heroic acts that are remembered hundreds of years after they happened. Some people made history, others wrote about it.
Technology has made recording historical events easier than ever. Every fact demands great evidence and today we have all the means to offer it. But it hasn’t always been this way. Some of the stories we know might be pure fiction, but that doesn’t make them less fascinating.
It seems that history has a funny way of repeating itself — and not always in a good way. Sometimes it happened because people didn’t know enough about past mistakes. Other times, they did, yet they’ve learned nothing from them.
From famous writers to inventors, philosophers and politicians, everyone has an opinion on the meaning and importance of history.
Here Are 130 Famous History Quotes about Why History is so Important, How It Repeats Itself and Making History
Quotes about why history is important
A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.
MARCUS GARVEY
If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.
MICHAEL CRICHTON
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.
KATE ATKINSON
The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
ERNEST DIMNET
History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.
B. C. FORBES
If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.
E. O. WILSON
A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future.
ROBERT A HEINLEIN
Our history is not our destiny.
ALAN COHEN
The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Life moves fast. As much as you can, learn from your history, you have to move forward.
EDDIE VEDDER
Quotes about how history repeats itself
History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.
KURT VONNEGUT
The past changes a little every time we retell it.
HILARY MANTEL
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
KARL MARX
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
WILL DURANT
I’ve been completely fascinated with history because it tells everything about what’s going to happen next because it’s cyclical, everything repeats in general.
EMILIE AUTUMN
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
ERIC HOFFER
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
JAMES BALDWIN
Quotes about making history
It had long come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
OSCAR WILDE
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
KARL MARX
We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
HENRY FORD
Today is either the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. Today we are making history.
ECKHARD PFEIFFER
The history of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always acts like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.
THOMAS CARLYLE
The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
ALEISTER CROWLEY
The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.
LEON TROTSKY
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
OTTO VON BISMARCK
History is written by the victors.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Famous history quotes
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
MARTIN LUTHER
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
KARL MARX
Human history in essence is the history of ideas.
H. G. WELLS
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
MAYA ANGELOU
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
GEORGE ORWELL (more George Orwell quotes)
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE (more Napoleon Bonaparte quotes)
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
C. WRIGHT MILLS
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Human history is not the product of the wise direction of human reason, but is shaped by the forces of emotion — our dreams, our pride, our greed, our fears, and our desire for revenge.
LIN YUTANG
History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
LORD ACTON
Whether in commerce, science, or politics — history remembers the artists.
NAVAL RAVIKANT
We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.
CHUCK PALAHNIUK
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
FRANZ KAFKA
On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.
ALFRED DE VIGNY
The best prophet of the future is the past.
LORD BYRON
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
History is a pack of lies we play on the dead.
VOLTAIRE
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
KARL MARX
History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.
MALCOLM X (more Malcolm X quotes)
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!
DESMOND TUTU
History is merely gossip.
OSCAR WILDE
History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.
MAHMOUD DARWISH
We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars.
ANATOLE BROYARD
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.
GEORGE ORWELL – 1984 (more 1984 quotes)
Quotes about black history
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Black history is American history.
MORGAN FREEMAN
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
KARL MARX
You cannot amputate your history from your destiny, because that is redemption.
BETH MOORE
Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Funny history quotes
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
ANATOLE FRANCE
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
C. S. LEWIS
On human stupidity: It is one of the most powerful forces that shape history.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
A. J. P. TAYLOR
When the great history of trouble is written, my family will stand extremely high in the table of contents.
ALLAN SHERMAN
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
AMBROSE BIERCE
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
DAVID BEN GURION
A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
MAX EASTMAN
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. MENCKEN
I felt like a pickle stepping into history.
BILL CLINTON
People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.
DEAN KAMEN
Yeah, I read history. But it doesn’t make you nice. Hitler read history, too.
JOAN RIVERS
History can bring luck: this is what we can call optimism.
STEPHANE HESSEL
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
JOHN W. GARDNER
Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.
HILARY MANTEL
History quotes for teachers
History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.
E. L. DOCTOROW
Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.
MASON COOLEY
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.
HILARY MANTEL
Every historian discloses a new horizon.
GEORGE SAND
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
H. G. WELLS
The historian is a prophet looking backward.
KARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL
To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.
AUGUSTE COMTE
To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.
BARBARA TUCHMAN
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
RUDYARD KIPLING
History is information. Memory is part of your identity.
DAVID MILIBAND
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don’t know anything about, and when I learn about them they’re always fascinating.
ANDREW STANTON
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.
GOLDA MEIR
History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.
RONALD REAGAN
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
The historian will tell you what happened. The novelist will tell you what it felt like.
E. L. DOCTOROW
History quotes for students
To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
HERMANN HESSE
What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.
VICTOR HUGO
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
BARUCH SPINOZA
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
Work hard, have fun and make history.
JEFF BEZOS
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
HERMANN HESSE
There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
You don’t hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.
STEPHEN AMBROSE
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
CARL JUNG
Study men, not historians.
HARRY S. TRUMAN
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
ANGELA CARTER
I can’t change history, I don’t want to change history. I can only change the future. I’m working on that.
BORIS BECKER
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
NORMAN COUSINS
Unlike any other time in our history, we have to know that staying in school and getting an education is the most important thing you can do.
ALEXIS HERMAN
A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.
ANNIE BESANT
If you don’t know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.
HOWARD ZINN
A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.
MAX LERNER
We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgement on the past.
DOUGLAS HURD
Ideas shape the course of history.
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES
Many of the greatest crimes in history were caused not by hatred, but rather by indifference. They were caused by people who could have done something, but did not even bother lifting a finger.
YUVAL NOAH HARARI
Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history.
ARTHUR HENDERSON
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
STEPHEN COVEY
I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.
DAISAKU IKEDA
There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.
MICHELLE OBAMA
Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.
MARGE PIERCY
History quotes about love
Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notion of time; effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.
ANNE LOUISE GERMAINE DE STAËL
Each time you happen to me all over again.
EDITH WHARTON
Once I had a love and it was divine.
BLONDIE
Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.
NICOLE KRAUSS
Only one life, that soon is past. Only what’s done with love will last.
UNKNOWN
There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.
SARAH DESSEN
Come out of the circle of time. And into the circle of love.
RUMI
And it’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
NICOLE KRAUSS
