This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The great tragedies of history occur not when right confronts wrong, but when two rights confront each other." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"All truly great achievements in history resulted from the actualization of principles, not from the clever evaluation of political conditions." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pre-tested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restrain." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"The ultimate meaning of history – as of life – we can find only within ourselves." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Throughout history the political influence of nations has been roughly correlative to their military power." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"History is often cruel, and rarely logical, and yet the wisest of realists are those who recognize that fate can indeed be shaped by human faith and courage." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"The little I have seen of the world, teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends, I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each man's life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Not what men do worthily, but what they do successfully, is what is history makes haste to record." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The mystery of history is an insoluble problem." - Henry Ward Beecher
"No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime." - Hermann Keyserling, fully Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling
"Let us labor for that larger comprehension of truth, and that more thorough repudiation of error, which shall make the history of mankind a series of ascending developments." - Horace Mann
"Everyone is biased, whether they know it or not, in possessing fundamental goals, purposes, and ends. If we understand that, we can be properly skeptical of all historians (and journalists and anyone who reports on the world) and check to see if their biases cause them to emphasize certain things in history and omit or give slight consideration to others." - Howard Zinn
"Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that's not true." - Howard Zinn
"Missing from [history] are the countless small actions of unknown people that led up to those great moments. When we understand this, we can see that the tiniest acts of protest in which we engage may become the invisible roots of social change." - Howard Zinn
"The pretense of objectivity conceals the fact that all history, while recalling the past, serves some present interest." - Howard Zinn
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness…The future is an infinite succession of "presents," and to live now as we think that human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory." - Howard Zinn
"The general notions about human understanding illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things totally unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, nor new. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom." -
"History is but the unrolled scroll of prophecy." - James A. Garfield
"The world’s history is a divine poem of which the history of every nation is a canto and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian - the humble listener - there has been a divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come." - James A. Garfield
"There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, an feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite." - James A. Garfield
"Often in history we see that religion, which was meant to raise us and make us better and nobler, has made people behave like beasts. Instead of bringing enlightenment of them, it has often tried to keep them in the dark; instead of broadening their minds, it has frequently made the narrow-minded and intolerant of others." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years." - Jimmy Carter, fully James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr.
"In what light so ever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue." - John Quincy Adams
"The state of the whole universe at any instant we believe to be the consequence of its state at the previous instant; insomuch that one who knew all the agents which exist at the present moment, their collocation in space, and all their properties, in other words, the laws of their agency, could predict the whole subsequent history of the universe, at least unless some new volition of a power capable of controlling the universe should supervene. And if any particular state of the entire universe could ever recur a second time, all subsequent states would return too, and history would, like a circulating decimal of many figures, periodically repeat itself." - John Stuart Mill
"[Economic] and social changes, though among the greatest, are not the only forces which shape the course of our species. Ideas are not always the mere signs and effects of social circumstances: they are themselves a power in history." - John Stuart Mill
"Few learn much from history who do not bring much with them to its study." - John Stuart Mill
"The progressive principle is antagonistic to the sway of custom. The contest between these two principles, custom and progress, constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind." - John Stuart Mill
"One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole." - José Ortega y Gasset
"We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it." - José Ortega y Gasset
"Tradition is an important help to history, but its statements should be carefully scrutinized before we rely on them." - Joseph Addison
"The Problem - Myth might be defined simply as "other people's religion," to which an equivalent definition of religion would be "misunderstood mythology"... Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts of the human will... Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors." - Joseph Campbell
"'You put stock in winning wars, 'the grubby iniquitous old man scoffed. 'The real trick lies in losing wars, and in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers. Look at our own recent history. Italy won a war in Ethiopia and promptly stumbled into serious trouble. Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning. But now that we are losing again, everything has taken a turn for the better, and we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.'" - Joseph Heller
"For 3,500 years, Jews have been telling themselves, their children, and the rest of the world: Be good. Be kind. Be honest. Be ethical. Be moral. It is the most revolutionary message in human history." - Joseph Jacobs
"History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, n some sort, to be malleable." - Joseph Joubert
"It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes." - Joseph Stalin, fully Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, born Loseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
"And yet - strange contradictions for those who believe in time - geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything." - Henri Poincaré, fully Jules Henri Poincaré
"Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself." - Julio Cortázar
"History is the display of the supposed advantages of power and intelligence which some men possess over others, of the struggle for existence hypocritically described by ideologists as the struggle for justice and freedom, of the ebb and flow of old and new forms of human righteousness, each vying with the rest in the solemnity and triviality... Yet one drop of eternity is of greater weight than a vast ocean of finite things." - Karl Barth
"Men make their own history… but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The traditions of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living." - Karl Marx
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected. This is why we can say that, in science, we often learn from our mistakes, and why we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress there." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"The greatest event in natural history was the birth of conscience in the human mind. That was the moment when man put aside his strongest natural instinct, which was self-interest." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy