Famous Quotes & Sayings

David McCullough

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

David McCullough

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

C. Wright Mills

History is the shank of the social sciences.

Cesare Pavese

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Cary Grant

Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.

E. Hicks

When you think about it, history is made to be broken. That's the way we look at it.

Kurt Vonnegut

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

Kurt Vonnegut

History! Read it and weep!

Edward Gibbon

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

Edgar Degas

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.

Eli Whitney

An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor,

Craig McHugh

The patent application was to protect our invention. As you can see . . . the invention is significant.

Sydney Smith

Correspondences are like small clothes before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up.

Alexander Graham Bell

Washington is no place in which to carry out inventions

Adolf Hitler

Conscience is a Jewish invention.

Alfred North Whitehead

The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention.

Chuck Palahniuk

I'm never going to have to work. None of my descendants are ever going to have to work; this is going to make me so much money. It was such a letdown when I realized that wasn't my invention.

Andy Kindler

Some of my inventions didn't take off. I invented a url lengthener.

David Burnett

I see myself as a recorder of history, sort of a visual historian.

Rick Perlstein

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Kenneth Baker

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.

Hassan Rouhani

I've said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it.

George W. Bush

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history - revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Niall Ferguson

The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful - because you read. There's some sociopathic problem that makes me prefer it to human interaction.

Paul Johnson

What strikes the historian surveying anti-Semitism worldwide over more than two millennia is its fundamental irrationality. It seems to make no sense, any more than malaria or meningitis makes sense.

Michael Korda

The novelist wants to know how things will turn out; the historian already knows how things turned out, but wants to know why they turned out the way they did.

Thomas Keith

I'm very excited, especially traveling with the president, who is a historian on Scotland.