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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.”

Ifs Thinking Men Made Enough Moments Together Purpose Justice Moral History Issues Involved Periods Conscience Mark Aids Confusion Great Men Mutual Trumpets Moral Issues Mutual Aid

Author:Jane Addams

“We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success. There should be no place for despondency. The crisis can and must be fought by uniting our intellectual, spiritual and material resources.”

“Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is a case of bad men doing wrong things for wicked reasons. This is the full-sized or standard purebred evil and is easily recognized even by moral neophytes. Other malignities-drugs in America, famine in Africa and everything in the Middle East-are more complex. When combating those evils people sometimes have trouble deciding whom to shoot.”

Source: Give War a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer

“There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.”

Art Real Philosophy Individual Moral History Progress

Author:Charles Baudelaire

“History is not truth versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What's important is what we make of it; its moral use. By writing history, we can widen readers' thinking and deepen their sympathies in every direction. Perhaps history should show us not how to control the world, but how to enlarge, deepen, and discipline ourselves.”

Thinking World Should Writing Important Play Use Shows Dream Moral History Reader Discipline Errors Reactions Tendencies Falsehood Versus Mixtures What's Important Writing History Power Play

Book:Heart Mountain

Source: Heart Mountain

“somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.”

School Moral History Century Replaced

Author:C. V. Wedgwood

“History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.”

Way Political Used Moral History Collections Spite Protest Historian Occasional Precedent

Author:C. V. Wedgwood

“History presents the pleasantest features of poetry and fiction,--the majesty of the epic, the moving accidents of the drama, the surprises and moral of the romance. Wallace is a ruder Hector; Robinson Crusoe is not stranger that Croesus; the Knights of Ashby never burnish the page of Scott with richer lights of lance and armor than the Carthaginians, winding down the Alps, cast upon Livy.”

Light Romance Moving Fiction Moral History Drama Pages Surprise Casts Stranger Accidents Features Epic Majesty Knights Armor Alps Hector Robinson Crusoe Winding Down

Book:Pleasures of Literature

Source: Pleasures of Literature

“The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.”

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

“But the sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the awful spectacle, and, pursuing the ordinary occupations of life and study, appeared unconscious of any alterations in the moral of physical government of the world.”

World Government Moral History Study Ordinary Awful Unconscious Occupation Rome Sage Greece Roman Empire Alterations Greece And Rome

Book:The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812

Source: The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812

“It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.”

Source: THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (All 6 Volumes): From the Height of the Roman Empire, the Age of Trajan and the Antonines - to the Fall of Byzantium; Including a Review of the Crusades, and the State of Rome during the Middle Ages

“Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.”

Reason Suffering Moral History Generations Terrible Intellectual Defeat Witness Triumph Height Savages Brutality Setback

Author:Stefan Zweig

“We all accuse Vladimir Putin of Cold War nostalgia, but Washington's elites - politicians and intellectuals - miss the old days as well. They wish for the world in which the United States was utterly dominant over its friends, its foes were to be shunned entirely, and the challenges were stark, moral, and vital. Today's world is messy and complicated. China is one of our biggest trading partners and our looming geopolitical rival. Russia is a surly spoiler, but it has a globalized middle class and has created ties in Europe.”

“[Wendy] Davis [pursued] higher education, as her campaign website says, with 'the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.' Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second - now ex - husband. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.”

“Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.”

May Moral Creativity History Intellectual Suicide Liberation Invitations Postmodernism Sirens

Author:Gertrude Himmelfarb

“It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.”

World War Moral History Conflict Achievement Noble Vain Accomplishment Minorities World History

Author:John Bartholomew Gough

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.”

“America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.”

People World Today America Faces Purpose Nations Moral Principles History Presidential Engaged Philanthropy Kinder Moral Principles Character Education

Author:George H. W. Bush

“History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.”

Facts Moral History Lessons Argument Here And Now Accumulation Pointless

Book:A History of Modern Britain

Source: A History of Modern Britain

“The earth's becoming at a particular period the residence of human beings, was an era in the moral, not in the physical world, that our study and contemplation of the earth, and the laws which govern its animate productions, ought no more to be considered in the light of a disturbance or deviation from the system, than the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter should be regarded as a physical event in the history of those heavenly bodies, however influential they may have become from that time in advancing the progress of sound philosophy among men.”

Source: Principles of Geology

“In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation's moral and material health. The whole educational system, theater, film, literature, the press and broadcasting - all these will be used as a means to this end.”

“Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.”

Order Moral History Creative Revolution Balance Insanity Be Creative Metaphysical Rebellious

Author:Albert Camus

“Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth. Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political and cultural idea.”

“It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.”

Giving Art Reason Philosophy Moral History Sensitivity Orientation

Author:Maurice Barres

“When you consider that God could have commanded anything he wanted--anything!--the Ten [Commandments] have got to rank as one of the great missed moral opportunities of all time. How different history would have been had he clearly and unmistakably forbidden war, tyranny, taking over other people's countries, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning, treating women--or anyone--as chattel or inferior beings.”