This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton
"History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth." - Jean Cocteau
"If man can, with almost complete assurance, predict phenomena when he knows their laws, and if, even when he does not, he can still, with great expectation of success, forecast the future on the basis of his experience of the past, why, then, should it be regarded as a fantastic undertaking to sketch, with some pretense to truth, the future destiny of man on the basis of his history?" -
"A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast." - Albert Cooper, fully Albert Glen Cooper
"Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents." - Paul Copperman
"History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit." - Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
"All history is but a romance unless it is studied as an example." - George Croly
"Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would not follow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course.)" - Donald Davidson
"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." - Abba Eban, born Aubrey Solomon Meir Eban
"O Youth: Do you know that yours is not the first generation to yearn for a life of beauty and freedom? Do you know that all your ancestors felt as you do - and fell victim to trouble and hatred? Do you know, also, that your fervent wishes can only find fulfillment if you succeed in attaining love and understanding of men, and animals, and plants, and stars, so that every joy becomes your joy and every pain your pain? Open your eyes, your heart, your hands, and avoid the poison your forebears so greedily sucked in from History. Then will all the earth be your fatherland, and all your work and effort spread forth blessings." - Albert Einstein
"With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organization. The struggle for individual existence disappears... Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom." - Friedrich Engels
"One intellectual excitement has, however, been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen." - Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They finally won by their defeats." - B. C. Forbes, fully Bertie Charles "B.C." Forbes
"It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead." - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster
"Nothing in history has turned out to be more impermanent than military victory." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctions; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true." - Michel Foucault
"We are living the events which for centuries to come will be minutely studied by scholars who will undoubtedly describe these days as probably the most exciting and creative in the history of mankind. But preoccupied with our daily chores, our worries and personal hopes and ambitions, few of us are actually living in the present." - Lawrence K. Frank
"History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires." - Léon Gambetta
"I hold the relay race theory of history: progress in human affairs depends upon accepting, generation after generation, the individual duty to oppose the evils of the time." - Martha Gellhorn, fully Martha Ellis Gellhorn
"Those who are versed in the history of their country, in the history of the human race, must know that rigorous state prosecutions have always preceded the era of convulsion; and this era, I fear, will be accelerated by the folly and madness of our rulers. If the people are discontented, the proper mode of quieting their discontent is, not by instituting rigorous and sanguinary prosecutions, but by redressing their wrongs and conciliating their affections. Courts of justice, indeed, may be called in to the aid of ministerial vengeance; but if once the purity of their proceedings is suspected, they will cease to be objects of reverence to the nation; they will degenerate into empty and expensive pageantry, and become the partial instruments of vexatious oppression. Whatever may become of me, my principles will last forever. Individuals may perish; but truth is eternal. The rude blasts of tyranny may blow from every quarter; but freedom is that hardy plant which will survive the tempest and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavorable soil." - Joseph Gerrald
"The steady pressure to consume, absorb, participate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth and mail involves a cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled in history. We are being killed with kindness. We are being stifled with culture and material joys." - Herbert Gold
"A current time-slice theory makes the justificational status of a belief wholly a function of what is true of the cognizer at the time of belief. An historical theory makes the justificational status of a belief depend on its prior history. Since my historical theory emphasizes the reliability of the belief-generating processes, it may be called ‘historical reliabilism.’" - Alvin Ira Goldman
"Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." - Oscar Handlin
"A generation which ignores history has no past - and no future." - Robert A. Heinlein, fully Robert Anson Heinlein, pen name for Anson MacDonald
"Journalism allows it's readers to witness history. Fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it." - John Hersey, fully John Richard Hersey
"In the pioneer days of our history it was easy to love one's neighbor and respect his rights, when possibly the neighbor lived at a distance of four or five miles and the relations were not intimate enough to occasion a clash of interests. Now one finds that society rather than another individual is his neighbor." - John Grier Hibben
"A great man is a gift, in some measure of a revelation of God. A great man, living for high ends, is the divinest thing that can be seen on earth. The value and interest of history are derived chiefly from the lives and services of the eminent men whom it commemorates." - George Stillman Hillard
"Kids today live with awful nightmares: AIDS will wipe us out; the polar ice cap will melt; the nuclear bomb will go off at any minute. Even the best tend to believe we are hopeless to affect matters... Young people are detached from history, the planet and, most important, the future." - Abbie Hoffman, fully Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman
"History is a story of growth, decay and change. If no provision, no allowance is made for change by peaceful means, it will come anyway - and with violence." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such, the providence of God has commanded science to labor and prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron tracks, and stretching her wires and bridging the oceans. But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and political relations the breath of a higher life? Who shall touch the eyes of a paganized science, and of a pantheistic philosophy, that they may see God? Who shall consecrate to the glory of God the triumphs of science? Who shall bear the life-boat to the stranded and perishing nations." -
"Imagination, whatever may be said to the contrary, will always hold a place in history, as truth does in romance. Has not romance been penned with history in view?" - Arsène Houssaye
"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior." - David Hume
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach." - Aldous Leonard Huxley
"A woman’s whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure, she embarks her soul in the traffic of affection; and, if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless, for it is a bankruptcy of the heart." - Washington Irving
"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism." - William James
"Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism." - William James
"If every nation gets the government it deserves every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world." - Elizabeth Janeway, born Elizabeth Ames Hall
"A myth is a collective 'dream' of an entire people at a certain point in their history... But a myth not only lives in literature and imagination, it immediately finds its way into the behavior and attitudes of the culture - into the practical daily lives of the people." - Robert A. Johnson
"We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world - or make it the last." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy
"A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind. I do not know which makes man more conservative - to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past." - John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes of Tilton
"Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten... America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay. If it loses the will to finish or slackens in its determination, history will recall its crimes and the country that would be great will lack the most indispensable element of greatness - justice." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals." - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Nations have passed away and left no traces, And history gives the naked cause of it - One single simple reason in all cases; They fell because their peoples were not fit." - Rudyard Kipling
"History is a better guide than good intention." - Jeane Kirkpatrick