Looking for the most inspirational quotes about history? We have rounded up the best collection of history quotes, sayings, captions, and messages (with images and pictures) about preserving history, traditions, culture, customs, beliefs, historical architecture, and more to inspire you.
Also See: Heritage Quotes
History is the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions, and behaviors. It covers all aspects of human society, be it social, political, economic, scientific, technological, medical, cultural, intellectual, religious, and military developments are all part of history.
Studying history allows us to observe and understand how people and societies behaved.
Knowing the past has a huge impact on human behavior and analyzing the mistakes to learn from them.
Historial events help us understand how the past made things the way they are today and in the future.
Also See: History Repeats Itself Quotes
The importance of studying and knowing history is very important because knowledge of the past offers new perspectives about the present, and studying history gives us deeper insight into our lives and the lives of others.
These inspirational history proverbs and history matters quotes and sayings will give you deep and wise insight into the significance of history in our present lives.
Top History Quotes About Ancient Times
- “History is not was, it is.” – William Faulkner
quotes about learning from history
- “History is a relay of revolutions.” – Saul Alinsky
- “History is philosophy teaching by examples.” – Thucydides
- “If you think you have it tough, read history books.” – Bill Maher
- “History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.” – Will Durant
- “History gets thicker as it approaches recent times.” – A.J.P. Taylor
- “You have to know the past to understand the present.” – Carl Sagan
quotes about history
- “History is the story of events, with praise or blame.” – Cotton Mather
- “The main thing is to make history, not to write it.” – Otto von Bismarck
- “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” – Edmund Burke
history quotes
- “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” – James Baldwin
- “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” – Lord Acton
- “A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.” – Robert A. Heinlein
- “History’s like a story in a way: it depends on who is telling it.” – Dorothy Salisbury Davis
- “History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.” – Johan Huizinga
- “History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.” – Lech Walesa
- “The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.” – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
- “You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.” – Jawaharlal Nehru
- “No volume of history is insignificant, even the worst chapters. Especially the worst chapters.” – Terri Guillemets
- “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
- “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” – Maya Angelou
- “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” – George Orwell
- “History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” – David McCullough
- “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
- “The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?” – Katharine Anthony
- “History is the action and reaction of these two, nature and thought – two boys pushing each other on the curbstone of the pavement.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity.” – Dexter Perkins
Inspirational Quotes About History
- “History is a story written by the finger of God.” – C.S. Lewis
- “History is a vast early warning system.” – Norman Cousins
- “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” – Mark Twain
- “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “Human history, in essence, is the history of ideas.” – H. G. Wells
- “To remain ignorant of history is to remain forever a child.” – Cicero
quote on history
- “Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” – Oscar Wilde
Famous History Quotes
- “History is information. Memory is part of your identity.” – David Miliband
- “History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.” – George Santayana
- “History can bring luck: this is what we can call optimism.” – Stephane Hessel
- “History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.” – Graydon Carter
- “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” – John W. Gardner
- “History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.” – Konrad Adenauer
- “No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.” – Johan Huizinga
- “Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.” – Mason Cooley
- “History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.” – Charles Angoff
- “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.” – Etienne Gilson
- “More and more, I tend to read history. I often find it more up to date than the daily newspapers.” – Joe Murray
- “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” – Aristotle
- “To study history means submitting yourself to chaos, but nevertheless retaining your faith in order and meaning.” – Herman Hesse
- “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” – C. Wright Mills
- “History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.” – Karl Marx
- “History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.” – Thomas Carlyle
- “History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.” – John F. Kennedy
- “In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.” – Edmund Burke
- “The writing of histories – as Goethe once noted – is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past…. The writing of history liberates us from history.” – Benedetto Croce
- “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.” – Robert Penn Warren
Best History Quotes For Students
- “The best prophet of the future is the past.” – Lord Byron
- “The duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Study the past if you would define the future.” – Confucius
Inspirational Quotes About History
- “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “God cannot alter the past, though historians can.” – Samuel Butler
- “Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.” – Edward R. Murrow
- “Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.” – Lynn White, Jr.
- “History, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” – James Joyce
- “We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!” – Desmond Tutu
- “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston S. Churchill
- “And the whole world watched, and history remembered.” – Casey McQuiston
- “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.” – Henry James
- “History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.” – Hajo Holborn
- “We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” – Chuck Palahniuk
- “When history fails to shed light on the truth, myth creates its own.” – Samantha Shannon
- “History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.” – George W. Bush
- “Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.” – George W. Bush
- “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” – Winston Churchill
- “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive.” – John Morley
- “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” – Malcolm X
- “The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “I can’t change history, I don’t want to change history. I can only change the future. I’m working on that.” – Boris Becker
- “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.” – James Fenimore Cooper
- “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 D. Eisenhower
Historical Quotes By Famous Historians
- “History is an argument without end.” – Pieter Geyl, Dutch historian (1887-1966)
- “History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” – David McCullough, American historian (1933- )
- “We are a day away from making history, and a history towards the breaking of tomorrow.” – Anthony Liccione
- “[The historian is] an unsuccessful novelist.” – H. L. Mencken, American journalist and satirist (1880-1956)
- “If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.” – Pearl S. Buck, American novelist (1892-1973)
- “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.” – Edward Hallett Carr, British historian (1892-1982)
- “History is the study of all the world’s crime.” – Voltaire, French writer and philosopher (1694-1778)
- “The historian must serve two masters: the past and the present.” – Fritz Stern, German-American historian (1926- )
- “Historians are themselves the products of history.” – Paul Conkin and Roland Stromberg, American historians
- “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, American philosopher (1863-1952)
- “Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.” – Franklin P. Jones, American journalist (1908-1980)
- “Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.” – Leo Tolstoy, Russian writer and philosopher (1828-1910)
- “History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveller.” – Henry Glassie, US historian (1941- )
- “The more I study history the more I realise how little mankind has changed. There are no new scripts, just different actors.” – Richard Paul Evans, American author (1962- )
- “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday. If you were born yesterday then any leader can tell you anything.” – Howard Zinn, American historian (1924-2010)
- “It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world occasionally swapped history books, just to see what the other people are doing with the same set of facts.” – Bill Vaughan, American writer (1915-1977)
- “What experience and history teach is that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.” – Georg Hegel, German philosopher (1770-1831)
- “History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.” – Henry Steele Commager, American historian (1902-1998)
- “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe.” – Dan Brown, American novelist (1964- )
- “One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.” – John Jay Chapman, American author (1862-1933)
- “The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.” – Albert Camus, French-Algerian author (1913-1960)
- “The truth that all historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.” – Carl Becker, American historian (1873-1945)
- “What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say ‘There is a great river and it flows through this land, and we have named it History’.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, American writer (1929- )
- “A historian ought to be exact, sincere and impartial, free from passion, unbiased by interest, fear, resentment or affection. And faithful to the truth, which is the mother of history, the preserver of great actions, the enemy of oblivion, the witness of the past, the director of the future.” – B. R. Ambedkar, Indian politician (1891-1956)
- “History is an aggregate of half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip and official prevarications. It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era.” – Philip D. Jordan, American historian (1903-1980)
- “I don’t know much about history and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” – Henry Ford, American industrialist (1863-1947)
- “The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.” – Alan Bennett, English playwright (1934- )
- “History is instructive. What it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper… Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.” – Howard Zinn, American historian (1922-2010)
- “The good historian… must be fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty. One who calls a fig a fig, and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any, from favour or from enmity, not influenced by pity, by shame, or by remorse. A just judge… a stranger to all, of no country, bound only by his own laws, acknowledging no sovereign, never considering what this or that man may say of him, but relating faithfully everything as it happened.” – Lucian, ancient Greek writer and satirist (c.125-185)
- “Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader… History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.” – Will Durant, American writer (1885-1981)
History Quotes To Learn From The Past
- “History is Storytelling.” – Yaa Gyasi
- “Our history is not our destiny.” – Alan Cohen
- “History is a symptom of our disease.” – Mao Tse-tung
- “History is written by the victors.” – Winston Churchill
- “Human history is a Gaian dream.” – Terence McKenna
- “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” – Karl Marx
history quotes images
- “If you want a present different from the past, study the past.” – Baruch Spinoza
- “The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.” – Richard M. Nixon
- “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” – Harry S. Truman
- “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” – H. G. Wells
- “I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.” – Richard Siken
- “The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.” – Franz Kafka
- “The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.” – A. Whitney Brown
- “The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.” – Robert Penn Warren
- “The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.” – Colum McCann
- “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” – Kurt Vonnegut
- “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” – Victor Hugo
- “Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Life moves fast. As much as you can, learn from your history, you have to move forward.” – Eddie Vedder
- “The History of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.” – Ernest Dimnet
- “History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” – Ronald Reagan
- “Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.” – Peter Lamborn Wilson
- “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.” – George Santayana
- “Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.” – Kate Atkinson
- “If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.” – E. O. Wilson
- “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” – Edward Gibbon
- “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein
- “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” – Aldous Huxley
- “To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to keep looking back.” – Sarah Dessen
- “I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.” – James Baldwin
- “History as well as life itself is complicated — neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” – Jared Diamond
- “Never question the power of one! Throughout history it has been the actions of only one person who has inspired the movement of change.” – Steve Maraboli
- “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” – Ambrose Bierce
Best History Captions
- Let’s make some history.
- History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme.
- Archaeologists make it fun to learn about the past.
- History matters. Visit museums, battlefields, and parks.
- The only way to go back in time is to not watch the clock.
- History has its eyes on you. You’re going to do great things.
- Sip your way back in time with the flavors of ancient Rome.
- History has been made over a round of drinks. Let’s light up the conversation.
- Let’s go where we can talk about history and laughter—it all passes so quickly.
- History feels like a fading dream to me. Memory a mist, almost always unreal.
- Whether you wrote it, lived it or dreamt it, there’s so much history in every sip.
- History capitalizes on your love for travel and nostalgia by transporting you to other places in time.
- History is worth a second look. Our newspapers from 100 years ago need new homes, and you can help.
- We’re always looking to the future, but sometimes we want to take a break and remember yesterday.
- Looking for a little bit of history in your life? Make the next adventure a little more meaningful.
- So many great things have already been invented…Or discovered… There’s no limit to what you’ll accomplish.
- History is made every day. The world keeps spinning and things keep happening. History is what you make of it.
- Are you a history buff? If so, here’s a list of important dates and places that helped shape the history of this great city.
- It’s been a hundred years since the last time beer was outlawed. Let’s make it another hundred before it happens again!
- History is important. It’s real and tangible. It connects us to those who came before. And when you’re connected, you’re empowered.
More Inspirational Quotes
As quoted by Dalai Lama; “We cannot change the past, but we can reshape the future. Young people have the opportunity to create a happier, better future.”
So learning and studying historical events is imperative for students, teachers, and people to learn from the past and not repeat the faults of ancient times.
Humankind and race have come a long way, and our ancestors have done things that were great and legendary.
To know all about the ancient world and its culture knowing your history is the foundation for building a great future.
Read on to find these encouraging words of wisdom about history repeats to motivate you in building your business, leading your life, creating success, achieving your goals, and overcoming your fears to do anything you set your mind to.
Don’t forget to read our collection of tomorrow is never promised quotes to inspire you to appreciate your loved ones and life.
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