History Henry Quotes & Sayings

I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have. — Henry Rollins

Literature stands related to Man as Science stands to Nature; it is his history. — John Henry Newman

Unconscious, perhaps, of the remote tendency of his own labours, he [Joseph Black] undermined that doctrine of material heat, which he seemed to support. For, by his advocacy of latent heat, he taught that its movements constantly battle, not only some of our senses, but all of them; and that, while our feelings make us believe that heat is lost, our intellect makes us believe that it is not lost. Here, we have apparent destructibility, and real indestructibility. To assert that a body received heat without its temperature rising, was to make the understanding correct the touch, and defy its dictates. It was a bold and beautiful paradox, which required courage as well as insight to broach, and the reception of which marks an epoch in the human mind, because it was an immense step towards idealizing matter into force. — Henry Thomas Buckle

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth. — Henry Ward Beecher

History's just one darn thing after another. — Henry Ford

An especially powerful type of historical evidence [for the Bible and Christianity] is that of fulfilled prophecy - historical events written down long before they actually happen. Hundreds of prophecies in the Bible have been remarkably fulfilled exactly as fortold but often hundreds of years later. This type of evidence is unique to the Bible and can be explained only by divine inspiration. God, the Creator of time, is outside of time. He is the One who controls the future and, therefore, is the only One who knows the future.
Bible prophecies are not vague and rambling, such as those of Nostradamus and other supposed extrabiblical prophets. Prophecies in the Bible deal with specific places, people, and events, and their fulfillments can be checked by reference to subsequent history. — Henry Morris

One must overcome history by dogma. — Henry Edward Manning

Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. — Henry David Thoreau

This recognition of the earlier human background, now so obvious to us, did not come all at once, for the inclusion of history itself in university instruction is an event less than two centuries old. — James Henry Breasted

They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain. — James Henry Breasted

History knows no resting places and no plateaus — Henry Kissinger

history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations. — Henry Kissinger

The researcher is more memorable than the researched. — Henry David Thoreau

Whether Henry was a royal trendsetter or it was practical under their helmets, I didn't know. I certainly couldn't think of any other reason for having the most hideous hairstyle in a History that includes Donald Trump. — Jodi Taylor

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. — Thomas Henry Huxley

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,
for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place. — Henry David Thoreau

That mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history - Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states. — Julian Barnes

History is the heritage and patrimony of mankind in its lessons of the past that give priceless inspiration for the future. — Henry Clausen

I was always told that I was good in mathematics, and I guess my grades and standardized test scores supported that. My worst subjects were those that generally involved a lot of reading - English and history. So, having good test scores in math and mediocre ones in reading, I was naturally advised to major in engineering in college. — Henry Petroski

I want a laitywho know their creed so well, that they can
give an account of it, who know so much of history that
they can defend it. — John Henry Newman

In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world. — Henry James Sumner Maine

The moral aspect was merely a concomitant, a coverall for some deeper, almost forgotten purpose. That histoire should be story, lie and history all in one, was of a significance not to be despised. And that a story, given out as the invention of a creative artist, should be regarded as the most effective material for getting at the truth about its author, was also significant. Lies can only be imbedded in truth. They have no separate existence; they have a symbiotic relationship with truth. A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal. To the one, that is, who seeks truth. To such a person there could never be cause for anger or recrimination when confronted with the lie. Not even pain, because all would be patent, naked and revelatory. — Henry Miller

I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness - their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome. Henry appears to look straight through him, — Hilary Mantel

A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction. — William Powell

Henry VIII, for example, who was king of England from 1509 to 1547, ended his days surrounded by a great many young people for the simple reason that he'd had most of his old courtiers exiled or executed. Between the years 1532 and 1540 alone, Henry ordered 330 political executions, probably more than any other ruler in British history. If you worked for Henry VIII, then you really didn't need to worry about putting money into your pension fund as you probably wouldn't live long enough to spend it. — John Connolly

A boy is a piece of existence quite separate from all things else, and deserves separate chapters in the natural history of men. — Henry Ward Beecher

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man's history. It is a man's duty to have books. — Henry Ward Beecher

The president's decision yesterday to set into motion the development of the hydrogen bomb ... has placed us on the knife-edge of history. — Henry M. Jackson

At no time in the history of man has the world been so full of pain and anguish. Here and there, however, we meet with individuals who are untouched, unsullied, by the common grief. We say of them that they have died to the world. They live in the moment, fully, and the radiance which emanates from them is a perpetual song of joy [ ... ] like the clown, we go through the motions, forever simulating, forever postponing the grand event- we die struggling to get born. We never were, never are. We are always in the process of becoming. Forever outside — Henry Miller

Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen. — Henry A. Kissinger

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life. — Henry Adams

Everyone lives in two worlds," Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. "There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought - in an inscape - every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. — Joe Hill

A lot of guys have had a lot of fun joking about Henry Ford because he admitted one time that he didn't know history. He don't know it, but history will know him. He has made more history than his critics ever read. — Will Rogers

This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution - quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest Hemingway walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. — Adam Haslett

Who but the artist has the power to open man up, to set free the imagination? The others - priest, teacher, saint, statesman, warrior - hold us to the path of history. They keep us chained to the rock, that the vultures may eat out our hearts. It is the artist who has the courage to go against the crowd; he is the unrecognized "hero of our time" - and of all time. — Henry Miller

As well as might we say that a ship is built, loaded and manned for the sake of any particular pilot, instead of acknowledging that the pilot is made for the sake of the ship, her lading, and her crew, who are always the owners in the political vessel; as to say that kingdoms were instituted for kings, not kings for kingdoms. — Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

Ancient philosophy was framed by prodigies,
Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.
And even though their thoughts were deemed the aristocratic voice,
they also had a thing for little boys.

Katherine the Great so it's been said,
needed large animals to be fulfilled in bed.
From historic rulers to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks.

Isn't life pretty? Earnest Hemingway once said,
then he a bullet through his head.
Salvador Dali's surreal paintings were God sent,
you'd never know he ate his own excrement.

Then there's Da Vinci for whom it required,
dressing in women's underwear to be inspired.
From the great romantics to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks.

Truman Capote needless to say,
would be intoxicated 20 hours a day.
From the modern authors to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks. — Henry Phillips

What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? — Henry David Thoreau

It is not often that nations learn from the past,even rarer that they draw the correct conclusions from it. — Henry Kissinger

[There is an] immense advantage to be gained by ample space and appropriate surroundings in aiding the formation of a just idea of the beauty and interest of each specimen... Nothing detracts so much from the enjoyment ... from a visit to a museum as the overcrowding of the specimens exhibited. — William Henry Flower

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history. — Henry Louis Gates

History is more or less bunk. — Henry Ford

Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history — Henry Morgenthau, Sr.

There are two classes of authors: the one write the history of their times, the other their biography. — Henry David Thoreau

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian. — James Henry Breasted

I'm a firm believer that no matter how small an object is, you can find interesting things out about it and its history. — Henry Petroski

No doubt Carlyle has a propensity to exaggerate the heroic in history, that is, he creates you an ideal hero rather than another thing ... Yet what were history if he did not exaggerate it? How comes it that history never has to wait for facts, but for a man to write it? The ages may go on forgetting the facts never so long, he can remember two for every one forgotten. The musty records of history, like the catacombs, contain the perishable remains, but only in the breast of genius are embalmed the souls of heroes. — Henry David Thoreau

Our history only makes us but does not defines us. — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. — Henry David Thoreau

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women. — Henry Adams

What is a living reality without experience? If there is anything about which we feel to be true, it is that the world we endure is authentic. We can see, touch and hear it. Our conscious existence of presence is an exhibition within the mind, but in many other occurrences, some of us rarely accept that we create our own realities. — Henry Johnson Jr

For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be. — Henry A. Kissinger

History doesn't mean dates and wars and textbooks to me; it means the unconquerable pioneer spirit of man. — Henry Ford

It may take a decade or two before the extent of Shakespeare's collaboration passes from the graduate seminar to the undergraduate lecture, and finally to popular biography, by which time it will be one of those things about Shakespeare that we thought we knew all along. Right now, though, for those who teach the plays and write about his life, it hasn't been easy abandoning old habits of mind. I know that I am not alone in struggling to come to terms with how profoundly it alters one's sense of how Shakespeare wrote, especially toward the end of his career when he coauthored half of his last ten plays. For intermixed with five that he wrote alone, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, are Timon of Athens (written with Thomas Middleton), Pericles (written with George Wilkins), and Henry the Eighth, the lost Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen (all written with John Fletcher). — James Shapiro

The poet writes the history of his own body. — Henry David Thoreau

Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [ ... ] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed. — James Henry Breasted

The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense. — Henry Rollins

He found on the spot the image of his recent history; he was like one of the figures of the old clock at Berne. THEY came out, on one side, at their hour, jigged along their little course in the public eye, and went in on the other side. He too had jigged his little course
him too a modest retreat awaited. — Henry James

I do not believe in diversification. Take a close look at
some of the greatest entrepreneurs in U.S. history. Henry Ford never
diversified; Bill Gates didn't diversify. I strongly believe that the best
way to create real wealth is to put one's eggs in one basket and watch
that basket (the right one) very carefully. In fact, one can go broke
diversifying. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The qualifications that I have to speak on world affairs are exactly the same ones Henry Kissinger has, and Walt Rostow has, or anybody in the Political Science Department, professional historians - none, none that you don't have. The only difference is, I don't pretend to have qualifications, nor do I pretend that qualifications are needed. I mean, if somebody were to ask me to give a talk on quantum physics, I'd refuse - because I don't understand enough. But world affairs are trivial: there's nothing in the social sciences or history or whatever that is beyond the intellectual capacities of an ordinary fifteen-year-old. You have to do a little work, you have to do some reading, you have to be able to think but there's nothing deep - if there are any theories around that require some special kind of training to understand, then they've been kept a carefully guarded secret. — Noam Chomsky

I now know that to do a worthwhile family history I must interpret the past without falling into either demonizing or unquestioning acceptance ... As a playwright, what I object to right now is any form of fundamentalism, whether it's nationalistic, religious or ethnic ... I think it is ridiculous - and fundamentalist, by the way - to say that I am not changed by the culture around me. — David Henry Hwang

My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced. — Henry Louis Gates

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost. — Henry David Thoreau

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? — Henry David Thoreau

A profound impression was created by the discourses of Professor GN Chakravarti and Mrs Besant, who is said to have risen to unusual heights of eloquence, so exhilarating were the influences of the gathering. Besides those who represented our society and religions, especially Vivekananda, VR Gandhi, Dharmapala, captivated the public, who had only heard of Indian people through the malicious reports of interested missionaries, and were now astounded to see before them and hear men who represented the ideal of spirituality and human perfectibility as taught in their respective sacred writings. — Henry Olcott

At the age of fifteen he had bought off a twopenny stall in the market a duo-decimo book of recipes, gossip, and homilies, printed in 1605. His stepmother, able to read figures, had screamed at the sight of it when he had proudly brought it home. 1605 was 'the olden days', meaning Henry VIII, the executioner's axe, and the Great Plague. She thrust the book into the kitchen fire with the tongs, yelling that it must be seething with lethal germs. A limited, though live, sense of history. And history was the reason why she would never go to London. She saw it as dominated by the Bloody Tower, Fleet Street full of demon barbers, as well as dangerous escalators everywhere. — Anthony Burgess

There is nothing finer in history than Thomas at Chickamauga. — Henry M. Cist

Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war) — Max Hastings

Indeed, the Englishman's history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France. — Henry David Thoreau

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed's coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour's death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe - Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise. — Dorothy Dunnett

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it. — Henry Hampton

I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I've just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book. — Antonia Fraser

Compared with this simple, fibrous life, our civilized history appears the chronicle of debility, of fashion, and the arts of luxury. But the civilized man misses no real refinement in the poetry of the rudest era. It reminds him that civilization does but dress men. It makes shoes, but it does not toughen the soles of the feet. It makes cloth of finer texture, but it does not touch the skin. Inside the civilized man stands the savage still in the place of honor. We are those blue-eyed, yellow-haired Saxons, those slender, dark-haired Normans. — Henry David Thoreau

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences. Absolutely nothing was uninteresting to him. His curiosity ranged from music to theology and from philosophy to history. He didn't simply know something about everything; he knew a great deal about everything. — H.L. Mencken

We should read history as little critically as we consider the landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than by its groundwork and composition. — Henry David Thoreau

If one asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him: It means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings. This American flag was the safeguard of liberty. It was an ordinance of liberty by the people, for the people. That it meant, that it means, and, by the blessing of God, that it shall mean to the end of time! — Henry Ward Beecher

The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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 that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today. — Henry Ford

To live only to suffer - only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged - it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer? — Henry James

Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis XIV, to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV? We scoff at M. de Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo. The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history? Why not love the whole of France?" It — Victor Hugo

If the relatively rich participating countries want to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, they will have to pay at least some poor countries to reduce their emissions. Achievement of substantial reduction in this way implies international transfers of wealth on a scale well beyond anything in recorded history. There is no effective political support for such a Herculean effort, particularly in the United States. — Henry Sylvester Jacoby

Early American speeches, from Washington's to Patrick Henry's, have been detheologized in history textbooks. No one has called it censorship. — James G. Watt

Some creatures are made to see in the dark. — Henry David Thoreau

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. — Henry Adams

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. — Thomas Henry Huxley

All the events which make the annals of the nations are but the shadows of our private experiences. — Henry David Thoreau

Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality. — George Henry Lewes

We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's dam is the history we make today. — Henry Ford

Giraldus claimed that he had heard about Eleanor's adultery with Geoffrey from the saintly Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who had learned of it from Henry II of England, Geoffrey's son and Eleanor's second husband. Eleanor was estranged from Henry at the time Giraldus was writing, and the king was trying to secure an annulment of their marriage from the Pope. It would have been to his advantage to declare her an adulterous wife who had had carnal relations with his father, for that in itself would have rendered their marriage incestuous and would have provided prima facie grounds for its dissolution. — Alison Weir

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system. — Henry Louis Gates

One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for the age of meteorites; and the estimated time for the tidal evolution of the Moon's orbit (though this is much rougher), all agree in their testimony, and, what is far more important, the red-shift in the nebulae indicates that this date is fundamental, not merely in the history of our system, but in that of the material universe as a whole. — Henry Norris Russell

In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary ... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, "memoirs to serve for a history," which is but materials to serve for a mythology. — Henry David Thoreau

I feel like I'm part of television history. — Henry Ian Cusick

The wisdom of our actions in the first three years of peace will determine the course of world history for half a century. — Henry A. Wallace

The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics. — Henry Kissinger

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians. — Henry Adams

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. — Patrick Henry

The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death. — Henry Miller