This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The history of man is a series of conspiracies to win from nature some advantage without paying for it." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The history of mankind is the history of arrested growth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The use of history is to give to the present hour and its duty." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness." - Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. n." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge; that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts; that hope always triumphs over experience; that laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe love is stronger than death." - Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
"Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task that has a beginning and an end balances out the complexity-without-end that often vexes the rest of my life. Sacred simplicity." - Robert Fulghum, fully Robert Lee Fulghum
"The history of intellectual progress is written in the lives of infidels." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities... There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand that this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible." - Ruth Benedict, born Ruth Fulton
"Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies." - Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
"The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they may have been written." - William Jones, fully Sir William Jones of Nayland, aka Trinity Jones
"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." - Susan Sontag
"After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, guides us by vanities. Think now she gives when our attention is distracted and what she gives, gives with such supple confusions that the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late what’s not believed in, or if still believed, in memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with till the refusal propagates a fear. Think neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. " - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
"Public opinion rarely considers the needs of the next generation or the history of the last. It is frequently hampered by myths and misinformation, by stereotypes and shibboleths, and by an innate resistance to innovation." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen
"Two things we ought to learn from history; one, that we are not in ourselves superior to our fathers; another, that we are shamefully and monstrously inferior to them, if we do not advance beyond them." - Thomas Arnold
"History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called thought." - Thomas Carlyle
"Biography is the only true history." - Thomas Carlyle
"History is the first distinct product of man's spiritual nature, his earliest expression of what can be called thought." - Thomas Carlyle
"Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." - Thomas Carlyle
"No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men." - Thomas Carlyle
"History is the distillation of rumor." - Thomas Carlyle
"History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"The history of liberty is a history of limitation of government power, not the increase of it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"Liberty never came from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"The history of liberty is the history of the limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist the concentration of power we are resisting the powers of death. Concentration of power precedes the destruction of human liberties." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson
"History is fables agreed upon." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors[crimes]." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"We read history through our prejudices." - Wendell Phillips
"Moral progress in history lies not so much in the improvement of the moral code as in the enlargement of the area within which it is applied." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." - Woody Allen, formally Heywood "Woody" Allen, born Allan Stewart Konigsberg
"If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?" - Marquis de Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat
"What is national freedom if not a people's inner freedom to cultivate its abilities along the beaten path of its history?" - Ahad HaAm, pen name, born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg
"We are human because, at a very early stage in the history of the species, our ancestors discovered a way of preserving and disseminating the results of experience." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of." - Bertolt Brecht
"Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues – and in terms of the problems of history-making. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles – and to the problems of the individual life." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills
"History is chaos and every attempt to interpret it otherwise is an illusion." - Charles A. Beard, fully Charles Austin Beard
"[When asked if he could summarize the lessons of history] 1. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad with power. 2. The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. 3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 4. When it is dark enough, you can see all the stars." - Charles A. Beard, fully Charles Austin Beard
"Everybody knows that the long continuance of a routine of habit makes us lethargic, while a succession of surprises wonderfully brightens the ideas. Where there is a motion, where history is a-making, there is the focus of mental activity, and it has been said that the arts and sciences reside within the temple of Janus, waking when that is open, but slumbering when it is closed." - C. S. Peirce, fully Charles Sanders Peirce
"In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man." -
"Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history. " - Doris Kearns Goodwin, born Doris Helen Kearns
"The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired." - Stephen Hawking
"Places not only are they happen. (And it is because they happen that they lend themselves so well to narration, whether as history or story)" - Edward S. Casey
"My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated." - Edward Wadie Saïd
"In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better. " - Edward de Bono