This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"How much happier would the religious history of the world been if the different religions and sects had seen their role as contributors to a common stream of seeking for the Ultimate, which always escapes the conceptual net, yet perennially inspires the search. Actually many in the modern world are becoming tolerant toward religion in the wrong way. Their tolerance is not a product of understanding but is bred of indifference. They see the conventional forms in which religion is practiced as empty shells although they excite in their defense belligerent intolerance." - Arthur W Osborn
"Every time history repeats itself the price goes up." - Author Unknown NULL
"Assassination has never changed the history of the world." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"History, in every country, is so taught as to magnify that country: children learn to believe that their own country has always been in the right and almost always victorious, that it has produced almost all the great men, and that it is in all respects superior to all other countries." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"History is invaluable in increasing our knowledge of human nature because it shows how people may be expected to behave in new situations. Many prominent men and women are completely ordinary in character, and only exceptional in their circumstances." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Man is cosmically unimportant, and… a (God), if there were one … would hardly mention us (in the history of the universe)." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men in history." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"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." -
"We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands." - Carl Sagan
"The history of the world and its peoples in three words – “Born, troubled, died.”" - Carl Sandburg
"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars." - Charles A. Beard, fully Charles Austin Beard
"Faith is the very heroism and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity but a faculty. Faith is a power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants." - Charles Henry Parkhurst
"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." -
"I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"Examine the history of all nations and all centuries and you will always find men subject to three codes: the code of nature, the code of society, and the code of religion; and constrained to infringe upon al three codes in succession, for these codes never were in harmony. the result of this has been that never was in any country... a real man, a real citizen, or a real believer." - Denis Diderot
"History is philosophy learned from examples." - Dionysius of Halicarnassus NULL
"Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn." - Earl Warren
"History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn." - Edmund Burke
"History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." - Edward Gibbon
"Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many. Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude. In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries, and the fear of future dangers, all contribute to inflame the mind, and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood." - Edward Gibbon
"The two Antonines... governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue... Their united reigns are possible the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government." - Edward Gibbon
"The preservation of peace and the improvement of the lot of all people require us to have faith in the rationality of humans. If we have this faith and if we pursue understanding, we have not the promise but at least the possibility of success. We should not be misled by promises. Humanity in all its history has repeatedly escaped disaster by a hair’s breadth. Total security has never been available to anyone. To expect it is unrealistic; to imagine that it can exist is to invite disaster." - Edward Teller
"There is no reason to repeat bad history." - Eleanor Holmes Norton
"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward women, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The history of past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present." - Ernest Dimnet
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved. As a rule the majority are wrong, the minority is usually right." - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs
"Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past." - Francis Bacon
"The justest division of human learning is that derived from the three different faculties of the soul, the seat of learning; history being relative to the memory, poetry to the imagination, and philosophy to the reason." - Francis Bacon
"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle... If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters." - Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
"The history of mind is its own act. Mind is only what it does, and its act is to make itself the object of its own consciousness. In history its act is to gain consciousness of itself as mind, to apprehend itself in its interpretation of itself to itself." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) - this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science; and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world... It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The history of the world begins with its general aim, the realization of the idea of spirit, only in an implicit form, that is, as nature; a hidden, most profoundly hidden, unconscious instinct; and the whole process of history (as already observed) is directed to rendering this unconscious impulse a conscious one... This vast congeries of volitions, interest and activities, constitute the instruments and means of the world-spirit for attaining its object; bringing it to consciousness, and realizing it." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"What experience and history teach is this - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"What experience and history teach is... that people and government have never learned anything from history." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The march of world history stands outside virtue, vice and justice." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history." - George Bernard Shaw
"The period of time covered by history is far too short to allow any perceptible progress in the popular sense of Evolution of the Human Species. The notion that there has been any such Progress since Caesar’s time (less than 20th centuries ago) is too absurd for discussion. All the savagery, barbarism, dark ages and the rest of it of which we have any record as existing in the past exists at the present moment." - George Bernard Shaw
"The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections… Every time a man finds his heart is troubled, that he is not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth." - George MacDonald
"The notion that there is and can be but one time, and that half of it is always intrinsically past and the other half always intrinsically future, belongs to the normal pathology of an animal mind: it marks the egoistical outlook of an active being endowed with imagination. Such a being will project the moral contrast produced by his momentary absorption in action upon the conditions and history of that action, and upon the universe at large. A perspective of hope and one of reminiscence divide for him a specious eternity; and for him the dramatic centre of existence, though always a different point in physical time, will always be precisely in himself." - George Santayana
"History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten." - George Santayana
"Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life." - George Santayana
"The memorable events of history are the visible effects of invisible changes in human thought." - Gustave Le Bon
"Men make history and not the other way round. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better." - Harry S. Truman
"God has given man a thrilling responsibility for this world. But man has not fulfilled his assignment. God has placed the tiller of history in man’s hand, but man has gone to his hammock and let the winds and tides sweep his ship along." - Harvey Cox, fully Harvey Gallagher Cox, Jr.
"For every civilization or every period of history it is true today: show me what kind of god you have and I will tell you what kind of humanity you possess." - Emil Brunner, fully Heinrich Emil Brunner
"History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger