The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
Johnathan Swift
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
Winston Churchill
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 Kissinger
History is the discovering of the principles of human nature.
David Hume
The world`s history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.
Friedrich von Schiller
The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!
Dwight David Eisenhower
Only strong personalities can endure history, the weak ones are extinguished by it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
Aldous Huxley
The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
Eric Hoffer
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Perhaps in time the so-called dark ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire
History books that contain no lies are extremely tedious.
Anatole France
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
When gossip grows old it becomes myth.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Blood alone moves the wheels of history.
Martin Luther
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.
Andre Maurois
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
Gustave Flaubert
What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel