“In peace sons bury their fathers; in war fathers bury their sons.”
Herodotus
WarPeace
History Quotes
200 FAMOUS QUOTES · HISTORY
History Quotes
Read the best history quotes on the past, memory and lessons for the future from Cicero, Herodotus, Thucydides, Kalhana, Ibn Khaldun, Lincoln, Nehru and more.
“The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true.”
Cicero
TruthHistorians
“Every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
Appius Claudius Caecus
DestinySelf Reliance
“Woe to the vanquished!”
Brennus (as recorded by Livy)
WarAncient Rome
“Make haste slowly.”
Augustus
PatienceShort Quotes
“Time discovers truth.”
Seneca
TruthTime
“Study the past if you would divine the future.”
Confucius
Past And FutureWisdom
“When Confucius had completed the Spring and Autumn, rebellious ministers and villainous sons were struck with terror.”
Mencius
HistoriansPower Of Writing
“I wished to examine all that concerns heaven and man, to penetrate the changes of the past and present.”
Sima Qian
HistoriansCuriosity
“Even what is past and gone can be brought before the eyes by the words of a true poet.”
Kalhana
MemoryStorytelling
“History is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races. On the surface it is information about the past, but its inner meaning involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth.”
Ibn Khaldun
TruthHistorians
“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.”
Francis Bacon
AntiquitiesTime
“We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.”
Voltaire
TruthHistorians
“Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books!”
Montesquieu
PeaceFunny
“History is a preceptor of prudence, not of principles.”
Edmund Burke
LessonsWisdom
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
FreedomProgress
“The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay
ProgressEngland
“Every reform was once a private opinion.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
ChangeIdeas
“History, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Ambrose Bierce
ScepticalFunny
“History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.”
Mahatma Gandhi
LovePeace
“History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.”
B. R. Ambedkar
EconomicsEthics
“Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.”
The Bible (Isaiah 51:1)
RootsHeritage
“Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us.”
The Bible (Luke 1:1)
Record KeepingFaith
“Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.”
The Bible (Psalm 90:1)
GenerationsFaith
“Force has no place where there is need of skill.”
Herodotus
SkillWisdom