Quotes about History

It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy.

One day some as yet unborn scholar will recognize in the clock the machine that has tamed the wilds.

One of our nation's greatest leaders of all time was Hubert Horatio Hornblower.

If she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

I and they, my chosen friends, my fellow-builders, shall write the firsts chapter in the new history of man

To say that that which was true in the 17th century cannot possibly be true today, because we travel in jet planes while they traveled in horse carts—is like saying that modern men do not need food, as men did in the past, because they are wearing trenchcoats and slacks, instead-of powdered wigs and hoop skirts.

I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. | ~~Ayn Rand "Philosophy: Who Needs It, 10

He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

Chicago, a town that's accustomed to its racial wounds and prides itself on a certain lack of sentiment.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.