History
- No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
-- Henry Brooks Adams
- The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
-- Anon.
- History belongs to the winner.
-- Anon.
- History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there.
-- Anon.
- We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.
-- Anon.
- Nostalgia is a seductive liar.
-- George W. Ball
- More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills, and proclamations.
-- John Barth
- Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
-- Matsuo Basho
- The lessons of history? There are four: The bee fertilizes the flower it robs; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power; the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small; when it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
-- Charles A. Beard
- History moves in contradictory waves, not in straight lines.
-- Louis Beck and Nikki Keddie
- The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
-- Max Beerbohm
- History: An account, mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- Mythology: the body of a primitive people's beliefs, concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deitits and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
-- Ambrose Bierce
- History is a simple piece of paper covered with print. The main thing is still to make history, not to write it.
-- Otto von Bismark
- What is history but a fable agreed upon?
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
- It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
-- Samuel Butler
- History is the devil's scripture.
-- Lord Byron
- History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
-- Thomas Carlyle
- History is a confused heap of facts.
-- Lord Chesterfield
- The causes of events are ever more interresting than the events themselves.
-- Cicero
- Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.
-- Mary Coleridge
- History is a vast early warning system
-- Norman Cousins
- History repeats itself, and that's one of the things that's wrong with history.
-- Clarence Darrow
- History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.
-- Dorothy Salisbury Davis
- When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
-- Eugene V. Debs
- History is philosophy learned from examples.
-- Dionysius of Halicarnassus
- Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
-- Will Durant
- One of the lessons of history is that 'nothing' is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant
- History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
-- Abba Eban
- History is the transformation of tumultuous conquerors into silent footnotes.
-- Paul Eldridge
- All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- History is an illogical record. It hinges on nothing. It is a story that changes, and has accidents, and recovers with scars.
-- Gretel Ehrlich
- Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
-- Gustav Flaubert
- History is more or less bunk.
-- Henry Ford
- History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
-- Anatole France
- History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.
-- John W. Gardner
- History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
-- Edward Gibbon
- Just as philosophy is the study of other people's misconceptions, so history is the study of other people's mistakes.
-- Phillip Guedalla
- History repeats itself; historians repeat each other.
-- Phillip Guedala
- War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.
-- Thomas Hardy
- Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.
-- Herodotus
- We will hereafter believe less history than ever, now that we have seen how it is made.
-- Don Herold
- The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of thr majority in the middle.
-- Eric Hoffer
- Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.
-- Philip Howard
- 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 Huxley
- The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
-- Randall Jarrell
- There is no wisdom equal to that which comes after the event.
-- Geraldine Jewsbury
- We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world -- or the last.
-- John F. Kennedy
- History knows no resting place and no plateaus.
-- Henry Kissinger
- Perhaps in time the so-called dark ages will be thought of as including our own.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- All history, of course, is the history of wars.
-- Penelope Lively
- The history of the world is the record of a man in quest for his daily bread and butter.
-- Hendrick Willem van Loon
- Throughout history females have picked providers. males have picked anything.
-- Margaret Mead
- The men who make history have not time to write it.
-- Metternich
- Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.
-- Henry de Montherlant
- The historian sees backward. In the end he also believes backward.
-- Frederich Wilhelm Nietzche
- Men after death are understood worse than men of the present, but heard better.
-- Frederich Wilhelm Nietzche
- History -- its what those bitter old men write.
-- Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
- Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.
-- George Orwell
- Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.
-- Ovid
- History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.
-- Nancy Pickard
- Give the historians something to write about.
-- Propertius
- The only thing that does not change is that at any and every time it appears that there have been "great changes."
-- Marcel Proust
- Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either.
-- Thomas H. Raddall
- A land without ruins is a land without memories--a land without memories is a land without history.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan
- The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.
-- Saki
- Every historian discloses a new horizon.
-- George Sand
- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana
- 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 man who sees two or three generations is like someone who sits in a conjurer's booth at a fair and sees the tricks two or three times. They are meant to be seen only once.
-- Arnold Schopenhauer
- History is past politics; and politics present history.
-- John Seeley
- Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
-- Lee Simonson
- I have no history but the length of my bones.
-- Robin Skelton
- History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.
-- Stephen Spender
- The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
-- Stendhal
- History as a discipline can be characterized as having a collective forgetfulness about women.
-- Clarice Stasz Stoll
- The greatest inventions were produced in the times of ignorance, as the use of the compass, gunpowder, and printing.
-- Jonathan Swift
- How many pens are broken, how many ink bottles consumed, to write about things that have never happened.
-- The Talmud
- History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
-- A.J.P. Taylor
- The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
-- Richard H. Tawney
- The wisdom of hindsight, so useful to historians and indeed to authors of memoirs, is sadly denied to practicing politicians.
-- Margaret Thatcher
- The function of posterity is to look after itself.
-- Dylan Thomas
- Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.
-- Leo Tolstoy
- History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.
-- Mark Twain
- History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.
-- Voltaire
- History is just a portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.
-- Voltaire
- Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells
- To give an accurate description of what never happened is the proper occupation of the historian.
-- Orson Wells
- There is no life that does not contribute to history.
-- Dorothy West
- It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
-- Rebecca West
- To give an accurate description of what never happened is the proper occupation of the historian.
-- Oscar Wilde
- History started badly and has been getting steadily worse.
-- Geoffrey Willans / Ronald Searle
- What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.
-- Virginia Woolf
- Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.
-- Ronald Wright
Hobbies
- Hobbies protect us from passions. One hobby becomes a passion.
-- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
- The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with appreciation of pure beauty.
-- Anne Morrow Lindburgh
- A hobby a day keeps the doldrums away.
-- Phyllis McGinley
- The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.
-- Phyllis McGinley
- The laws of chess are as beautiful as those governing the universe--and as deadly.
-- Katherine Neville
- It's the safety valve of middle life, and the solace of age.
-- Mary Roberts Rinehart
- Bridge is a social but not a very sociable game--that is, if you take it seriously, as most bridge players do.
-- Ruth Mills Teague
- The profound difference that divides the human race is a question of bait--whether to fish with worms or not.
-- Virginia Woolf
Home
- Thank God for dirty dishes; they have a tale to tell.
While other folk go hungry, we're eating pretty well.
With home and health and happiness, we shouldn't want to fuss;
For by this stack of evidence, God's very good to us.
-- Anon.
- There's no place like home, after the other places close.
-- Anon.
- You see much more of your children once they leave home.
-- Lucille Ball
- The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle. It stands for permanence and separation from the world.
-- Simone de Beauvoir
- To mankind in general, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth stand out as the supreme type of all that a host and hostess should not be.
-- Max Beerbohm
- Housework can kill you if done right.
-- Erma Bombeck
- A man's home is his wife's castle.
-- Alexander Chase
- Home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
-- G. K. Chesterton
- A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home.
-- Chinese Proverb
- No one can say of this house, "There is no trouble here."
-- Chinese Proverb
- My precept to all who build is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.
-- Cicero
- The home to everyone is to him his castle and fortress, as well for his defence against injury and violence, as for his repose.
-- Edward Coke
- A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.
-- Charles Caleb Colton
- Conran's rule of housework: it expands to fill the time available plus half an hour.
-- Shirley Conran
- Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.
-- Quentin Crisp
- Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has never been adopted there.
-- Walter Cronkite
- Where thou art, that, is Home.
-- Emily Dickinson
- Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day
Without suspecting our abode, until we drive away.
-- Emily Dickinson
- Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
-- Phyllis Diller
- many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.
-- George Norman Douglas
- To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years. The image is never marred. There's no dissappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
-- George Eliot
- Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
-- Robert Frost
- He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- We need not power or splendor,
Wide hall or lofty dome;
The good, the true, the tender,
These form the wealth of home.
-- Sarah J. Hale
- The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.
-- Ed Howe
- The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.
-- Kin Hubbard
- I want a house that has got over all its troubles. I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
-- Jerome K. Jerome
- A man's home may seem to be his castle on the outside; inside, it is more often his nursery.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
- Home, the spot of earth supremely blest,
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest.
-- Robert Montgomery
- Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.
-- Christian Morgenstern
- Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for beginners.
-- Charles H. Parkhurst
- Home is where the heart is.
-- Pliny the Elder
- Home is the most popular, and will be the most enduring of all earthly establishments.
-- Channing Pollock
- A house can have integrity, just like a person.
-- Ayn Rand
- I have come back again to where I belong; not an enchanted place, but the walls are strong.
-- Dorothy H. Rath
- "Home" is any four walls that enclose the right person.
-- Helen Rowland
- A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
-- May Sarton
- Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is to a cockatoo.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a great refuge from home life.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- A man builds a house in England with the expectation of living in it and leaving it to his children; we shed our houses in America as easily as a snail does his shell.
-- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- You can't go home again.
-- Thomas Wolfe
- I've got a self-cleaning oven -- I have to get up in the night to see if it's doing it.
-- Victoria Wood
- An honest man is one who's never been caught.
-- American Proverb
- Anger cannot be dishonest.
-- George R. Bach
- All the honesty in the world ain't legal tender for one loaf of bread.
-- Josh Billings
- Of all feats of skill, the most difficult is that of being honest.
-- Comtesse Diane (Marie de Beausacq)
- Wealth makes everything easy -- honesty most of all.
-- Comtesse Diane (Marie de Beausacq)
- Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
-- Stephen Vincent Benét
- Honesty is the rarest wealth anyone can possess, and yet all the honesty in the world ain't lawful tender for a loaf of bread.
-- Josh Billings
- Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.
-- Thomas Carlyle
- 'Tis my opinion every man cheats in his way, and he is only honest who is not discovered.
-- Susannah Centlivre
- What comes from the heart, goes to the heart.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
-- Sigmund Freud
- He that resolves to deal with none but honest men, must leave off dealing.
-- Thomas Fuller
- Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.
-- Billy Graham
- I liked the store detective who said he'd seen a lot of people who were so confused that they'd stolen things, but never one so confused they'd paid twice.
-- Baroness Phillips
- I would give no thought of what the world might say of me, if I could only transmit to posterity the reputation of an honest man.
-- Sam Houston
- Honesty pays, but it don't seem to pay enough to suit some people.
-- Kin Hubbard
- Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. it is not.
-- Dean William R. Inge
- Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
-- Don Marquis
- There is only one way to find out if a man is honest -- ask him. If he says 'yes', you know he is crooked.
-- Groucho Marx
- People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.
-- Richard J. Needham
- A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.
-- Ovid
- An honest man's the noblest work of God.
-- Alexander Pope
- The honester the man, the worse luck.
-- John Ray
- We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
-- George Bernard Shaw
- It is better to be quotable than to be honest.
-- Tom Stoppard
- Honesty is the best policy--when there is money in it.
-- Mark Twain
- To be honest, one must be inconsistent.
-- H. G. Wells
Honor
- Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.
-- Joseph Addison
- Honour follows those who flee it.
-- Anon.
- Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
-- Aristotle
- Honor before profit, where practical.
-- Gerald Barzan
- All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.
-- Andrew Carnegie
- Honor lies in honest toil.
-- Grover Cleveland
- No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave.
-- Calvin Coolidge
- Woman's honor is nice as ermine; it will not bear a soil.
-- John Dryden
- The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- A man of honour should never forget what he is because he sees what others are.
-- Baltasar Gracian
- When a virtuous man is raised, it brings gladness to his friends, grief to his enemies, and glory to his posterity.
-- Ben Jonson
- A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.
-- Walter Lippman
- But without money, honor is nothing but a malady.
-- Jean Racine
- Fame is something which must be won. Honour is something which must not be lost.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Honor wears different coats to different eyes.
-- Barbara W. Tuchman
- It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
-- Mark Twain
- When faith is lost, when honor dies, the man is dead!
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
Hope
- A misty morning does not signify a cloudy day.
-- Ancient Proverb
- Hope is a waking dream.
-- Aristotle
- Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper
-- Francis Bacon
- Hope is the parent of faith.
-- Cyrus A. Bartol
- We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.
-- Elizabeth Bibesco
- When hope is taken away from a people, moral degeneration follows swiftly thereafter.
-- Pearl S. Buck
- To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
-- Pearl S. Buck
- To the sick, while there is life there is hope.
-- Cicero
- If you do not hope, you will not find out what is beyond your hopes.
-- St. Clement
- Hope costs nothing.
-- Colette
- The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.
-- Norman Cousins
- "Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches on the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all--
-- Emily Dickinson
- A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.
-- George Eliot
- Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
-- English Proverb
- He that waits for a dead man's shoes may long go barefoot.
-- French Proverb
- He that lives upon hope will die fasting.
-- Benjamin Franklin
- In all things it is better to hope than to despair.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Hope is generally a wrong guide, though it is very good company by the way.
-- Lord Halifax
- Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart; and you'll never walk alone; you'll never walk alone.
-- Oscar Hammerstein II
- An act of God was defined as something no reasonable man could have expected.
-- A. P. Herbert
- Hope is the poor man's bread.
-- George Herbert
- We do not really feel greatful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.
-- Hoffer
- We should not expect something for nothing but we all do, and we call it hope.
-- Ed Howe
- Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll
- Hope is a talent like any other.
-- Storm Jameson
- Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.
-- Samuel Johnson
- Hope is slowly extinguished and quickly revived.
-- Sophia Lee
- Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.
-- Martin Luther
- Every cloud has a silver lining, but it is sometimes difficult to get it to the mint.
-- Don Marquis
- Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
-- Mignon McLaughlin
- Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.
-- Herman Melville
- Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.
-- Ouida
- Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest.
-- Alexander Pope
- In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.
-- Charles Revson
- Our hopes, often though they deceive us, lead us pleasantly along the path of life.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
- To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.
-- Vita Sackville-West
- The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.
-- William Shakespeare
- Hope is a very unruly emotion.
-- Gloria Steinem
- Every life has a death, and every light a shadow. Be content to stand in the light, and let the shadow fall where it will.
-- Mary Stewart
- We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde
- From the withered tree, a flower blooms.
-- Zen Saying
Horses
- Horses are predictably unpredictable.
-- Loretta Gage
- When Allah created the horse, he said to the wind, "I will a creature procede from thee. Condense thyself." And the wind condensed itself, and the result was the horse.
-- Margaurite Henry
- They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.
-- Kate Millett
- Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
-- Alice Walker
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