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Quotes about history

Throughout recorded time . . . there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.

—George Orwell

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Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

—Voltaire

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Very little is known about the War of 1812 because the Americans lost it.

—Eric Nicol

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History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. . . . I read it a little as a duty; but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good-for-nothing, and hardly any women at all.

—Jane Austen

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We forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility.

—Herman Hesse

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What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy today that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have stood in the vanguard of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

—John B. Gough

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K is for "Kenghis Khan." He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

—Harlan Ellison

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The happiest hours of mankind are recorded on the blank pages of history.

—Thomas Carlyle

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To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man — these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. . . . History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

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History is the short trudge from Adam to atom.

—Leonard Louis Levinson

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We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.

—André Maurois

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In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes.

—Mogens Jallberg

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politics history democracy feudalism
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The history of art is the history of revivals.

—Samuel Butler

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It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.

—Greenpeace advertisement

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I have a history of trying to fix that which is broken, and I still don't think I've fully learned that people can't be fixed, they have to fix themselves.

—L.H. Cosway in Tegan's Blood

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