Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Historians

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.

The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

He that fights and runs away, May turn and fight another day; But he that is in battle slain, Will never rise to fight again.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Those who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the West nor Moscow.

The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage.

In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons.

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.

Once conscription was introduced during the First World War, and once Britain's wars ceased being confined to the empire or to continental Europe and began seriously threatening our own shores and safety, it became much easier to denounce any anti-war agitation and argument as inherently irresponsible and unpatriotic.

Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay.

I've always had a naughty streak.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

I'm just a Bolshevik with a laptop.

Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.

Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.

Trump's alliance with Russia's Vladimir Putin, in defiance of America's own intelligence community, the Department of Justice, and the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, forces us to face that the fundamental principles of our nation are under attack.

In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.

The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills.

Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin's gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he's right about everything like a tsar.

As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.

History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.

The real 'Lord of the Flies' is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

Social democracy does not represent an ideal future; it does not even represent the ideal past.

Hubris is interesting, because you get people who are often very clever, very powerful, have achieved great things, and then something goes wrong - they just don't know when to stop.

Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

The effect of the mass media is not to elicit belief but to maintain the apparatus of addiction.

The chief incalculable in war is the human will.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

On April 14, 1986, when the Reagan administration launched an airstrike on Libya in clear violation of international law, Kissinger did the rounds on news shows to justify the bombing. The day after the bombing, Kissinger appeared on ABC's 'Good Morning America' to voice his 'total support.' Attacking Libya, he said, was 'correct' and 'necessary.'

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

The memory of the Second World War hangs over Europe, an inescapable and irresistible point of reference. Historical parallels are usually misleading and dangerous.

The photograph of the Queen sitting stiffly across the table from Glasgow resident Susan McCarron is so natural and expressive that it looks utterly fake. It looks like an artist's portrait, complete with symbolism, humour and poignancy. No wonder the palace and the press have interpreted it in such different ways.

Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Vox populi vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God. The slogan was useful for those who first attempted to substitute the people for God as the source of political authority. Their attempt was ultimately so successful that God no longer seems to be needed in government.

Strings of coincidence can strengthen us in the determination to follow our deepest intuitions even when they run counter to conventional wisdom and logic and cannot be subjected to rational explanation.

Too few presidents have steeped themselves not just in Lincoln's words but his deeds, which is why Obama's acquaintance with the great man is so compelling - especially since, like President-elect Lincoln, Obama will take office at a perilous time.

Some archives and record offices are housed in your local museum or library; others have their own stand-alone building. Wherever they are, they are a treasure trove.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

It is convenient for Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair to say the rise of the Islamic State has nothing to do with the Iraq War because that takes the culpability off their shoulders. The Islamic State is a product of the Iraq War. It took about a 100 years to build the Iraqi state, and the Americans and the British destroyed it in an afternoon.

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

Heroism is endurance for one moment more.

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

The sheer number of legendary narratives and historically verifiable incidents invites us to revise assumptions about the origins of biological and chemical warfare and its moral and technological constraints.

There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human kind.

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.