Our only fault as humankind is that we are prone to repeating our mistakes, and these history quotes will open your eyes to stories of generations past.
Our history impacts us, and understanding it can benefit us.
Share your favorite quote about history with us in the comment section below.
What are the benefits of reading these historical quotes?
For you to understand how and why our present world is the way it is, look to history for answers.
Having knowledge of our history allows us to:
- understand where we are coming from
- understand our present
- gain knowledge so we can create a better future
An understanding of the successes and failures of the past is important if we are to grow and make progress from now on.
If we do not learn from our past mistakes, we are bound to repeat them.
When you have knowledge of history, you’ll be able to make more sense of the current world.
Studying past economic and cultural trends can help you predict what will happen next in today’s world.
It can also allow you to understand why some rules exist in today’s world.
To open your eyes to stories of the past, below is our collection of inspirational, wise, and helpful history quotes, history sayings, and history proverbs collected from a variety of sources over the years.
History Quotes To Get You Inspired By Legends Of The Past
1. “History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.” – Johan Huizinga
2. “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” – Maya Angelou
3. “The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?” – Katharine Anthony
4. “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
5. “No volume of history is insignificant, even the worst chapters. Especially the worst chapters.” – Terri Guillemets
6. “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
7. “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
8. “A generation which ignores history has no past – and no future.” – Robert A. Heinlein
9. “You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.” – Jawaharlal Nehru
10. “If you think you have it tough, read history books.” – Bill Maher
History quotes to open your eyes to stories of the past
11. “More and more, I tend to read history. I often find it more up to date than the daily newspapers.” – Joe Murray
12. “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
13. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” – Abraham Lincoln
14. History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.” – Thomas Carlyle
15. “History can bring luck: this is what we can call optimism.” – Stephane Hessel
16. “History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.” – Charles Angoff
17. “To study history means submitting yourself to chaos, but nevertheless retaining your faith in order and meaning.” – Herman Hesse
18. “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
19. “History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” – David McCullough
20. “He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.” – Lech Walesa
You might also like these wise Native American quotes on community, respect, and more.
History quotes to inspire and teach
21. “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
22. “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” – Alexis de Tocqueville
23. “The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.” – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
24. “History is the story of events, with praise or blame.” – Cotton Mather
25. “History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
26. “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
27. “History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.” – Lord Acton
28. “History is a relay of revolutions.” – Saul Alinsky
29. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” – James Baldwin
30. “History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.” – Etienne Gilson
History quotes that will enrich your life
31. “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” – John W. Gardner
32. “Human history, in essence, is the history of ideas.” – H. G. Wells
33. “Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” – Oscar Wilde
34. “No other discipline has its portals so wide open to the general public as history.” – Johan Huizinga
35. “Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
36. “Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.” – Mason Cooley
If you’re enjoying these quotes, make sure to check out our collection of psychology quotes that will help you understand yourself.
37. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” ― Mark Twain
38. “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
39. “History is philosophy teaching by examples.” – Thucydides
40. “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ― George Orwell
Inspirational quotes about history
41. “Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.” – Lynn White, Jr.
If you’re enjoying these quotes, you’ll love our collection of knowledge quotes for those who love learning.
42. “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.” – C. Wright Mills
43. “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
44. “The historian has been the hearth at which the soul of the country has been kept alive.” – John Morley
45. “History gets thicker as it approaches recent times.” – A.J.P. Taylor
46. “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana
47. “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
48. “History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.” – Hajo Holborn
49. “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” – Winston Churchill
50. “The best prophet of the future is the past.” – Lord Byron
More history quotes and sayings
51. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston S. Churchill
52. “History is a people’s memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.” – Malcolm X
53. “And the whole world watched, and history remembered.” – Casey McQuiston
54. “The duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.” – Oscar Wilde
55. “We’ll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.” – Chuck Palahniuk
56. “History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.” – James Fenimore Cooper
57. “Study the past if you would define the future.” – Confucius
58. “History, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” – James Joyce
59. “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
60. “When history fails to shed light on the truth, myth creates its own.”― Samantha Shannon
History quotes about the power of learning from the past
61. “God cannot alter the past, though historians can.” — Samuel Butler
62. “Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.” — Edward R. Murrow
63. “We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!”― Desmond Tutu
64. “It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.” — Henry James
65. “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” — Thomas Jefferson
66. “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H. G. Wells
67. “The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.” — A. Whitney Brown
68. “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” — Edward Gibbon
69. “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” — Aldous Huxley
70. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein
History Quotes to Ponder
71. “Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.” – Kate Atkinson
72. “The History of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.” – Ernest Dimnet
73. “History is a symptom of our disease.”― Mao Tse-tung
74. “If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.” – E. O. Wilson
75. “Our history is not our destiny” – Alan Cohen
76. “History is Storytelling.”― Yaa Gyasi
77. “Life moves fast. As much as you can, learn from your history, you have to move forward.” – Eddie Vedder
78. “History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.” – Kurt Vonnegut
79. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” – Karl Marx
80. “If you want a present different from the past, study the past.” – Baruch Spinoza
History Quotes About What History Is
81. “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.” — George Santayana
82. “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” — Ambrose Bierce
83. “The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.” — Franz Kafka
84. “What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” — Victor Hugo
85. “History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.” — Will Durant
86. “History is a vast early warning system.” — Norman Cousins
87. “History is information. Memory is part of your identity.” — David Miliband
88. “History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.” — George Santayana
89. “History is nothing if not an epic tale of missed opportunities.” — Graydon Carter
90. “Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.” — Aristotle
Famous History Quotes To Inspire Leadership
91. “History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
92. “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
93. “The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
94. “Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
95. “Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.” — George W. Bush
96. “History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy.” — George W. Bush
97. “There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.” — Harry S. Truman
98. “The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.” — Richard M. Nixon
99. “History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.” — Ronald Reagan
100. “History is written by the victors.” — Winston Churchill
History Quotes That Relate To Today’s Life
101. “The repeated lies become history, but they don’t necessarily become the truth.” ― Colum McCann
102. “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
103. “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
104. “I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.” ― Richard Siken
105. “Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.” ― Peter Lamborn Wilson
106. “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
107. “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
108. “The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.” ― Robert Penn Warren
109. “Human history is a Gaian dream.” ― Terence McKenna
110. “History as well as life itself is complicated — neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.” ― Jared Diamond
Did you enjoy these history quotes?
Having knowledge of our history allows us to learn from our mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future.
It gives us a chance to understand where we came from so we can create a better future.
When you look at history, you’ll know where you came from, get a better understanding of society today, understand what causes change, and get inspired to take action in your life.
Hopefully, the quotes above have inspired you to learn from your past.
Which of these history quotes resonated with you best?
Do you have any other favorite quotes to add?
Feel free to share with us in the comment section below.