Top 40 History Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”

— Michael Crichton

Also featured in: Family Quotes

2. “History is not was, it is.”

— William Faulkner

3. “History never repeats itself. Man always does.”

— Voltaire

4. “History does not belong to us; we belong to it.”

— Hans-Georg Gadamer

5. “If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.”

— Isaac Asimov

6. “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

— Rudyard Kipling

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “History is an argument without end.”

— Pieter Geyl

8. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

9. “History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”

— W.H. Auden

Also featured in: Study Quotes

10. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

— William Faulkner

11. “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”

— Howard Zinn

Also featured in: Justice Quotes, Moving Quotes

12. “Don’t confuse the truth with the opinion of the majority.”

— Jean Cocteau

13. “I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.”

— Marie Curie

14. “History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It’s been around a long time.”

— Terry Pratchett

15. “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

16. “There is no history of how bad became better.”

— Henry David Thoreau

Also featured in: Progress Quotes

17. “The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

18. “First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Also featured in: Patriotic Quotes

19. “History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

20. “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”

— Mark Twain

21. “The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.”

— William James

Also featured in: Fear Quotes, Past Quotes

22. “Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past.”

— Sigmund Freud

23. “Happy people have no history.”

— Leo Tolstoy

Also featured in: Quotes About People

24. “You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.”

— William Faulkner

Also featured in: Real Quotes

25. “History is a bath of blood.”

— William James

26. “All history was at first oral.”

— Samuel Johnson

Also featured in: Firsts Quotes

27. “History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

— James Joyce

28. “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.”

— Ernesto Che Guevara

29. “Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today’s laurels are tomorrow’s compost.”

— Tom Peters

30. “All our knowledge is symbolic.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

31. “Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.”

— Aldous Huxley

Also featured in: Firsts Quotes

32. “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”

— George Eliot

33. “Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.”

— Indira Gandhi

Also featured in: Forgiveness Quotes, Virtue Quotes

34. “We had to do what we had to do – Britain is great again.”

— Margaret Thatcher

35. “Why should we honour those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.”

— William Butler Yeats

36. “The future has a way of arriving unannounced.”

— George F. Will

37. “Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

— Frank Herbert

38. “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.”

— Margaret Mead

39. “Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.”

— William Blake

40. “All daring and courage, all iron endurance of misfortune-make for a finer, nobler type of manhood.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

41. “Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.”

— Albert Camus