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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.”

Art Philosophy History Virtue Circumstances Vices

Author:Honore de Balzac

“To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?”

Should May Stills History Written Events Circumstances Hot Raises Lists Smoking Significance Publishers Enterprising

Book:Practicing History: Selected Essays

Source: Practicing History: Selected Essays

“The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.”

Source: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

“There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.”

Men Deals History Military Circumstances Ordinary Extraordinary Navy True Happiness Ordinary Man

Author:William Halsey

“If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.”

Ifs Wells May Individual Nations History Circumstances Refrain Reproach Candor Discreet

Book:Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

Source: Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories

“[Michael] Brown's mom, Lesley McSpadden, is the latest African American mother whose tear-streaked face forces the nation to remember the name of yet another unarmed black teenager gunned down under questionable circumstances.”

“History is the record of encounters between character and circumstance.”

Character History Records Circumstances Encounters

Author:Donald Creighton

“Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.”

People Government Nations Principles Teach History Teaching Conditions Involved Periods Circumstances Offers Connected Consideration Peculiar Rulers Statesmen Exhibits

Book:Reading Hegel: The Introductions

Source: Reading Hegel: The Introductions

“Without the changed conditions, the product of a lost war, a revolution and a pervasive sense of national humiliation, Hitler would have remained a nobody. His main ability by far, as he came to realise during the course of 1919, was that in the prevailing circumstances he could inspire an audience which shared his basic political feelings, by the way he spoke, by the force of his rhetoric, by the very power of his prejudice, by the conviction he conveyed that there was a way out of Germany's plight.”

“My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime usually do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when all other rights have failed. A free people can only afford to make this mistake once.”