History Quotes
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The history of exploration has never been driven by exploration. But Columbus himself was a discoverer. So was Magellan. But the people who wrote checks were not. They had other motivations.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
Hilary Mantel
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I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.
Michael Dirda
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In the past our glorious visions of the future - heaven, paradise, nirvana - were thought to happen after death. The newer thought is that we do not have to die to get there. We are not speaking here of life after death in some mythical heaven, but life more abundant in real time in history. We are speaking of the next stage of our social evolution.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
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Everything about these times, I have to say, worries me, but that the majority of the human race - women, children, men - is subjected in various ways to the effects of inequality seems to me at the core of all the problems that consume us. Above all, inequality generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far - or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors. - from Incidental Inventions
Elena Ferrante
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The queens in history compare favorably with the kings.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Throughout the history of mankind there have been murderers and tyrants; and while it may seem momentarily that they have the upper hand, they have always fallen. Always.
Mahatma Gandhi
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I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.
Jane Austen
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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Our leading men are not of much account and never have been, but the average of the people is immense, beyond all history. Sometimes I think in all departments, literature and art included, that will be the way our superiority will exhibit itself. We will not have great individuals or great leaders, but a great average bulk, unprecedentedly great.
Walt Whitman
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The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.
Jimmy Carter
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Hillary Clinton was urging voters to make history, but a lot of voters, particularly women, had trouble with her history. And she was portraying herself as a feminist, as a glass ceiling breaker, but, in fact, in the eyes of many women, especially women closer to Hillary Clinton's own age, she had gotten where she was primarily on her husband's coattails.
Betsy McCaughey