History Tells Us Quotes & Sayings

History tells us that a general can move and feed an army as efficiently as he likes, but the real litmus test is the battlefield. — Saul David

History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive. — Edmund Morgan

Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and the ones who come after. It is given from above. Little do we understand this in the beginning, but time teaches us many things we did not expect to learn. That is life. It is the same everywhere. — Michael D. O'Brien

For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing. That while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by his people here on earth. — Barack Obama

So I do think sometimes the political mechanism is completely disconnected from the people. However, what I will say is that history tells us that whenever things start to move too fast, whenever progress makes people feel a little breathless, one of the go-to spots that government, that the ruling powers that society goes to is to try to repress women. — Anna Quindlen

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt. — Guy Vanderhaeghe

Once in a while a new government initiates a program to put power to better use, but its success or failure never really proves anything. In science, experiments are designed, checked, altered, repeated
but not in politics ... We have no real cumulative knowledge. History tells us nothing. That's the tragedy of a political reformer. — B.F. Skinner

My Lesbian history tells me that the vice squad is never our friend even when it is called in by women; that when police rid a neighborhood of 'undesirables,' the undesirables have also included street Lesbians; that I must find another way to fight violence against women without doing violence to my Lesbian self. I must find a way that does not cooperate with the state forces against sexuality, forces that raided my bars, beat up my women, entrapped us in bathrooms, closed our plays, and banned our books. — Joan Nestle

The loss of that oral tradition and the breakdown of communication between generations had set my family adrift, floating aimlessly without history and all its accumulated experience to guide us. We need context, we need myths, we need family legends in order to see the invisible legacy that follows us, that tells us who we are. — Diane Wilson

Roughly 21,000 new brands are introduced worldwide per year, yet history tells us that more than 90% of them are gone from the shelf a year later. — Martin Lindstrom

I think people should take mythology much more seriously, because it tells us an awful lot about the history of the human race. We tend to dismiss it as 'fairy tales,' when it isn't. Fairy tales in themselves are about fundamentals of human nature. And they keep being reinvented in different ways. Fantasy acknowledges that, whereas a lot of modern literature is trying to distance itself from 'story,' never mind anything else. Which is why a lot of books are read by the critics, then people buy them, put them on their shelves, and don't really read them much, because they're not very interesting! — Jan Siegel

During bull markets, everyone believes that he is committed to stocks for the long term. Unfortunately, history also tells us that during bear markets, you can hardly give stocks away. Most investors are simply not capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of an all-stock investment strategy. The — William J. Bernstein

Money has always been a tool used to control the people. It did not evolve from thousands of years of barter and trade like we are led to believe; the priest-kings of ancient Sumer first introduced it. Written in the Sumerian tablets (the oldest written and deciphered record of human history), is a financial transaction of depositing silver shekels at the palace temple. It is one of the earliest examples of a "Bill of Exchange" used by modern banks, and tells us that temples in antiquity served as the first banks, creating a link between bankers and royal bloodlines as far back as we can trace. — Joseph P. Kauffman

History tells us that the threat to prosperity is not debt but socialism. — George Gilder

Pseudoscience is almost always recognizable from a distance, and easy to confirm on close examination. Science is, however, not immune from hubris, and bad science can be tougher to spot. Those of us who make a living from science or science media must display scientific integrity. We must constantly test our assumptions and fight the siren song of consensus when our data tells us to be contrarian. We must remain independent of political or religious bias in evaluating our work. We must admit when we are wrong, and remain willing to evolve when verifiable data demands change. We must admit when we are uncertain, remain humble in advances, and offer courageous and independent advice grounded in science. — K. Lee Lerner

So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead. — Max Tegmark

Xenophon tells us that Socrates never neglected the body and did not praise those who did. We can imagine that it was because the physical body - volatile, unseen, and implicated in an automatized natural world - could seem so daemonic that entrusting life, both biological life and ethical life, to its dynamics could seem like ceding control of the human. — Brooke Holmes

Armed struggle is a necessary and morally correct form of resistance in the Six Counties against a government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority of the Irish people There are those who tell us that the British government will not be moved by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else. — Gerry Adams

History tells us more than we want to know about what is wrong with man, and we can hardly turn a page in the daily press without learning the specific time, place, and name of evil. But perhaps the most pervasive evil of all rarely appears in the news. This evil, the waste of human potential, is particularly painful to recognize for it strikes our parents and children, our friends and brothers, ourselves. — George Leonard

The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded. That is true power - profound power. The power to define a whole society. — Michael Crichton

History tells us that America does best when the private sector is energetic and entrepreneurial and the government is attentive and engaged. Who among us, really, would, looking back, wish to edit out either sphere at the entire expense of the other? — Jon Meacham

It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside ... — Joan D. Chittister

History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past. — Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Of course, if you photograph the behavior of women and men at a particular time in history, in a particular situation, you will capture differences. But the error lies in inferring that a snapshot is a lasting picture. What women and men do at a moment in time tells us nothing about what women and men are in some unvarying sense - or about what they can be. — Carol Tavris

It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst us. And, when they do, they will as
naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have so done before them. — Abraham Lincoln

The history of technology tells us that inventions are two a penny. There are many, many people who invent new things: machines, processes, tools, gizmos, gadgets, widgets, and the like. Such people are often portrayed as unsung heroes, ahead of their field, unrecognized in their own time — Anonymous

Our schedules are so hectic we can't get everything done, or else we are bored and restless, constantly looking for something to amuse us. We are the most frantic generation in history - and also the most entertained. The Bible tells us that both extremes are wrong. — Billy Graham

it cannot be the purpose of Scripture to provide us with certified information about some entity outside its story about us, whether that third entity be God or certain classical religious experiences or the theological history of Israel and the primal church or whatever. Since we and Scripture and what Scripture talks about are not external to one another, since Scripture tells a story about God and us that we are even now living, there is no position from which such exchanges could be conducted - perhaps not even God has such an Archimedean point. This observation kills two historically instantiated errors with one stone. — Ellen F. Davis

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors. — Stephen Fry

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context. — Jonathan Lethem

Part of the miracle of the resurrection is that it so empowered a ragtag band of fishermen and tax collectors that they were emboldened to stand against all earthly authority and power, and ultimately would upend the once inviolable order of the mighty Roman Empire. History tells us that this happened. So what better explanation can be offered for how it happened? Unless we have missed something, there exists none. And if there exists none, we are invited to submit to the logic of what we now know: that this most celebrated and most scorned miracle of miracles actually happened - and, perhaps most miraculously of all, can even be understood to have happened. — Eric Metaxas

The history of philosophy tells us we have a choice between viewing reason as timeless or as historical, but reason itself is unable to tell us which option is correct.... Since we cannot know whether we began with a correct understanding of reason itself, any philosophy based on reason must be hypothetical. This point is known as the limits of reason. According to postmodern thinkers, reason is not only unable to reach absolute truth, but it is grounded on what is called an exclusive disjunction; it must be one or the other, and cannot be conclusively demonstrated to be either. Since it is based on reason in one view or the other, philosophy can never offer anything but hypothetical explanations of reality, and certainly not absolute truth. — Fernando Canale

For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements. The universal truths concern what befits a person of a certain kind to say or do in accordance with probability and necessity - and that is the aim of poetry, even if it makes use of proper names.* A particular statement tells us what (for example) Alcibiades* did or what happened to him. In the case of comedy this is already manifest: the poets make up the story on the basis of probability and then attach names to the characters at random; — Aristotle.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time. — Gordon S. Wood

It's hard to talk about the importance of an imaginary hero. But heroes ARE important: Heroes tell us something about ourselves.
History tells us who we used to be, documentaries tell us who we are now; but heroes tell us who we WANT to be.
And a lot of our heroes depress me.
But when they made this particular hero, they didn't give him a gun
they gave him a screwdriver to fix things. They didn't give him a tank or a warship or an x-wing fighter
they gave him a box from which you can call for help. And they didn't give him a superpower or pointy ears or a heat-ray
they gave him an extra HEART. They gave him two hearts! And that's an extraordinary thing.
There will never come a time when we don't need a hero like the Doctor. — Steven Moffat

Admittedly, there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face. — Ronald Reagan

My wife's the reason anything gets done, she nudges me towards promise by degrees. She is a perfect symphony of one our son is her most beautiful reprise. We chase the melodies that seem to find us until they're finished songs and start to play. When senseless acts of tragedy remind us that nothing here is promised--not one day. This show is proof that history remembers. We live in times when hate and fear seem stronger. We rise and fall and light from dying embers--remembrances that hope and love last longer. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. I sing Vanessa's symphony. Eliza tells her story. Now, fill the world with music, love, and pride. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond teh dark there is only maybe. — Tim O'Brien

It's like guerrilla warfare. If you reveal your location, all it does is allow your opponent to improve his artillery bearings. It's better to move quietly, with stealth, under cover of night. You've got two choices: You can wear cammies and shimmy along on your belly, or you can put on a red coat and stand up for everyone to see. It comes down to whether you want to be the British army in the Revolutionary War or the Viet Cong. History tells us which tactic was more effective. — Ralph E. Reed Jr.

Anyway.
I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What matters is the character of ... stereotypes, and the gullibility with which we employ them. And these in the end depend upon ... our philosophy of life. If in that philosophy we assume that the world is codified according to a code which we possess, we are likely to make our reports of what is going on describe a world run by our code. But if our philosophy tells us that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas, then, when we use our stereotypes, we tend to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly. We tend, also, to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them. All useful history is antiseptic in this fashion. It enables us to know what fairy tale, what school book, what tradition, what novel, play, picture, phrase, planted one preconception in this mind, another in that mind. — Walter Lippmann

History tells Us It's Possible. — Behnam Rajabpoor

It is harder for queens, who have no luxury of meekness. History does not know how to reconcile our ambition or our power when we are strong enough to survive it. The priests have no tolerance for those of us driven by the divine madness of questions. And so our stories are blackend from the fire of righteous indignation by those who envy our imagined fornications. We become temptresses, harlots, and heretics.
I have been all and none of these, depending on who tells the tale. — Tosca Lee

If history tells us anything, it is that human culture and knowledge are constantly evolving. — James Redfield

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination. — Jodi Picoult

Cinema is a mixed form. L'Avventura has characters, it has social context, and these things are not trivial. Its plot is the disappearance of a disappearance. Possibly the most frightening plot imaginable. Forgetting the dead, whom all of history tells us we must remember. But what makes movies themselves, rather than novels or plays, is something else. What is it if not the film medium itself? The purity of the visual, which lies in the silence of the stilled image. The freeze frame. The deeply, deeply silent image. Like death. The image in itself in its silent purity reaches
it reaches!
for the purity of death. — Frank Lentricchia

It's a presidential [election] year [2016], certainly everyone is talking about it, but if the history of the show tells us anything, the Big Brother cast does not usually discuss political issues like that in the house. — Allison Grodner

history tells us of the case of a man living under the peculiar delusion that he was a fried egg. Quite how or when this idea had entered his head, no one knew, but he now refused to sit down anywhere for fear that he would 'break himself' and 'spill the yolk'. His doctors tried sedatives and other drugs to appease his fears, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, one of them made the effort to enter the mind of the deluded patient and suggested that he should carry a piece of toast with him at all times, which he could place on any chair he wished to sit on, and thereby protect himself from breaking his yolk. From then on, the deluded man was never seen without a piece of toast handy, and was able to continue a more or less normal existence. — Alain De Botton

I have always wondered what it would have been like for an outsider to have witnessed firsthand the gathering dark of Hitler's rule. How did the city look, what did one hear, see, and smell, and how did diplomats and other visitors interpret the events occurring around them? Hindsight tells us that during that fragile time the course of history could so easily have been changed. Why, then, did no one change it? Why did it take so long to recognize the real danger posed by Hitler and his regime? — Erik Larson

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books. — Bill Bryson

No one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing. — Kim Stanley Robinson

History tells us what works in the gym, and everything else walks down the road with a carrot in its ass. — Mark Rippetoe

The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

M. and I have plagued each other with our differences for more than forty years. But it is also a tonic.
Along with the differences that abide in each of us, there is also in each of us the maverick, the darling stubborn one who won't listen, who insists, who chooses preference or the spirited guess over yardsticks or even history. I suspect this maverick is somewhat what the soul is, or at least that the soul lives close by and companionably with its agitating and inquiring force. And of course all of it, the differences and the maverick uprisings, are part of the richness of life. If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of you, or you of me? I bring home sassafras leaves and M. looks and admires. She tells me how it feels to float in the air above the town and the harbor, and my world is sweetened by her description of those blue miles. The touch of our separate excitements is another of the gifts of our life together. — Mary Oliver

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. — John Le Carre

He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and, as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games. The — Suzanne Collins

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. — Abraham Lincoln

Mankind, as history tells us over and over again, seeks the least painful solution and, as a result, ends up exchanging one problem for
another — Gyan Nagpal

Let me be straight with you: I'm not really qualified to write this book. I don't have a Bible or seminary degree. I'm not a pastor or a counselor. I don't know biblical languages and don't know how to do exegesis - whatever that even is. Again, I'm just a messed-up twenty-three-year-old guy. But I know that God has quite the sense of humor. It only takes a quick peek into Christian history to realize I'm almost the exact type of person he is looking for. A wise man two thousand years ago put it this way: "But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong."1 Paul tells us that God loves using people who are useless by worldly standards - because then he gets all the credit. A crooked stick can still draw a straight line, and a messed-up dude like me can still write about an awesome God. I've tasted grace and can't help but tell others about it. — Jefferson Bethke

...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. — Giles MacDonogh

There is no valid reason for the perennial Christian preference of biography, history, and the newspaper to fiction and poetry. The former tell us what happened, while literature tells us what happens. The example of the Bible, which is central to any attempt to formulate a Christian approach to literature, sanctions the imagination as a valid form of truth. The Bible is in large part a work of imagination. Its most customary way of expressing truth is not the sermon or the theological outline, but the story, the poem, and the vision
all of them literary forms and products of the imagination (though not necessarily the fictional imagination). Literary conventions are present in the Bible from start to finish, even in the most historically factual parts. — Leland Ryken

The twentieth century may tell us that we have nothing to be complacent about in the recent history of humankind; but it also tells us that there is nothing inevitable about tyranny. — Rowan Williams

There is obstruction. Enlightenment is not very popular in this world. History tells us that enlightened teachers who made themselves largely available to human beings had problems. — Frederick Lenz

It's curious that the Church has become the most tightfisted at the very time in history when God has provided most generously. There's considerable talk about the end of the age, and many people seem to believe that Christ will return in their lifetime. But why is it that expecting Christ's return hasn't radically influenced our giving? Why is it that people who believe in the soon return of Christ are so quick to build their own financial empires
which prophecy tells us will perish
and so slow to build God's kingdom? — Randy Alcorn

History will only ever be partial, to a large extent history tells us what we think should be remembered and what should be forgotten, I find that really problematic. — Matt Smith

There is a long history of monetary experience. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government. — Garet Garrett

The gospel is not something partial or piecemeal: it takes in the whole life, the whole of history, the whole world. It tells us about creation and the final judgment and everything in between. — David Lloyd-Jones

When someone tells me about Malala, the girl who was shot by the Taliban - that's my definition for her - I don't think she's me. Now I don't even feel as if I was shot. Even my life in Swat feels like a part of history or a movie I watched. Things change. God has given us a brain and a heart which tell us how to live. — Malala Yousafzai