History Quotes

I've never tried to be accepted. When everyone is doing one thing, I've always had the instinct to go the other way. I don't understand how an individual with their own mind, their own values, and their own beliefs can be so willing to just follow what everybody else is doing. How can you make history doing what everybody else is doing?

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.

If you look back throughout history from the ancient Egyptians onwards, most cultures started making clothing from a very basic premise: a single piece of cloth.

I have so much history with Just For Laughs. My career took off there.

The Phoenicians are entitled to be commemorated in history by the side of the Hellenic and Latin nations; but their case affords a fresh proof, and perhaps the strongest proof of all, that the development of national energies in antiquity was of a one-sided character.

I don't deny the importance of genetics. However, the fact that I might be altruistic isn't because I have a gene for altruism; the fact that I do something for my children at some cost to myself comes from a history that has operated on me.

This is an exciting time. A new chapter in our history.

A lot of people would say history is important because it helps us to predict the future. I don't think that it does particularly. What it really teaches you is that things have not always been the same, and they don't have to be the way they are.

I don't compete with other discus throwers. I compete with my own history.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history, but it's not very deep.

Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.

Society may no longer define marriage in the only way marriage has ever been defined in the annals of recorded history. Many societies allowed polygamy, many allowed child marriages, some allowed marriage within families; but none, in thousands of years, defined marriage as the union of people of the same sex.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

Marxism, Freudianism, global warming. These are proof - of which history offers so many examples - that people can be suckers on a grand scale. To their fanatical followers they are a substitute for religion. Global warming, in particular, is a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.

Watching Rachel Maddow is like going to Target. You went in for milk, but you left with shampoo, candles, and the entire history of the Byzantine Empire. 'I didn't need this.'

I'm obsessed by the idea of making my mark on history. And Arsenal is my paradise.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government.

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.

What has history said of eminence without honor, wealth without wisdom, power and possessions without principle? The answer is reiterated in the overthrow of the mightiest empires of ancient times. Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome! The four successive, universal powers of the past. What and where are they?