History is the study of the past, specifically the people, societies, events, and problems of the past as well as our challenges to understand them. History is important to our life because we do not use history only to study the past but also to know more about moving forward learning from the past. These history quotes will inspire us to understand the meaning of history better. Learning history is important, history teaches us great lessons, it helps us in understanding how to combat life moving forward.
35 History Quotes
- “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Mark Twain
- “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
- “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” Virginia Woolf
- “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” George Orwell
- “Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.” Zadie Smith
- “The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.” Franz Kafka
- “History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.” Will Durant
- “You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.” Jawaharlal Nehru
- “History is a race between education and catastrophe.” G. Wells
- “History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.” Johan Huizinga
- “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” Maya Angelou
- “The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?” Katharine Anthony
- “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” Victor Hugo
- “The pull, the attraction of history, is in our human nature. What makes us tick? Why do we do what we do? How much is luck the deciding factor?” David McCullough
- “A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.” Robert A. Heinlein
- “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” Mahatma Gandhi
- “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.” Konrad Adenauer
- “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” Thomas Jefferson
- “History is a vast early warning system.” Norman Cousins
- “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” James Baldwin
- “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” Alexis de Tocqueville
- “History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” John Dalberg-Acton
- “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” Aldous Huxley
- “The best history doesn’t just sit behind a glass case; it helps us to understand what’s outside the case.” Barack Obama
- “The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.” Woodrow Wilson
- “We cannot escape history.” Abraham Lincoln
- “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” GEORGE SANTAYANA
- “History is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it.” PETER CAREY
- “And history with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page.” LORD BYRON
- “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” Napoleon Bonaparte
- “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” John W. Gardner
- “There are no extraordinary men… just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.” William Halsey
- “History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.” Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” Winston Churchill
