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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Historical literature8 quotes
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave. — H.A.L. Fisher · 1935History...is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. — Edward Gibbon · 1776History is the essence of innumerable Biographies. — Thomas Carlyle · 1830Human blunders, however, usually, do more to shape history than human wickedness. — A.J.P. Taylor · 1961Nothing changes more constantly that the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but what men believe happened. — Gerald White Johnson · 1943All 8 quotes →Philosophical literature7 quotes
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana · 1905To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. — Cicero · 46 BCWhat experience and history teach is this-that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1830History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity. — Cicero · 55 BCHistory is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. — Karl Marx · 1845There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. — Karl Popper · 1945All 7 quotes →Political literature7 quotes
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. — Karl Marx · 1848Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852Who built the Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?...
Where, the evening that the wall of China was finished
Did the masons go? — Bertolt Brecht · 1936At every step the natural light which illuminates their path grows dimmer and less secure; and that, in spite of all their efforts, they have as yet only discovered a small number of conflicting notions, on which the mind of man has been tossed about for thousands of years, without either laying a firmer grasp on truth, or finding novelty even in its errors. — Alexis de Tocqueville · 1840People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. — Edmund Burke · 1790History is a relay of revolutions. — Saul Alinsky · 1971All 7 quotes →Economic literature2 quotes
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. — Karl Marx · 1848A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. — John Maynard Keynes · 1926Biography1 quote
The history of things that didn’t happen has never been written. — Henry Kissinger · 1972Comedy (stand up)1 quote
John F. Kennedy. Remember him? He fucked Marilyn Monroe. Matter of fact, him and his brother Bobby fucked Marilyn Monroe. And history doesn’t talk about that much. You know why history doesn’t talk about that much? Because those two pages in history are stuck together. — Dave Chappelle · 2000Military speech1 quote
Think of it, soldiers; from the summit of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you. — Napoleon Bonaparte · 1823Modernist literature1 quote
History...is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. — James Joyce · 1922