History isn’t a timeline.
It’s not clean.
It doesn’t sit still in a textbook or wait politely in a museum.
It leaks. It bleeds.
It edits itself.
Sometimes it lies.
Other times, it shows up in someone’s voice.
A song. A memory. A headline.
A sentence that slips through time and hits you in the gut.
The quotes you’re about to read?
They aren’t just about the past.
They’re about the now.
And the part of you that remembers
—even if you weren’t there.
Let’s see what history had the nerve to say.
1. “I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.” – Kanye West
2. “The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.” – Carl T. Rowan
3. “History develops, art stands still.” – E. M. Forster
4. “History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be.” – John Henrik Clarke
5. “Here I am at the turn of the millennium and I’m still the last man to have walked on the moon, somewhat disappointing. It says more about what we have not done than about what we have done.” – Gene Cernan
6. “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
7. “I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.” – Haruki Murakami
8. “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” – Napoleon Bonaparte
9. “The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.” – M. Scott Peck
10. “You can’t change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward.” – Margot Lee Shetterly
11. “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” – Aldous Huxley
12. “History shows that there are no invincible armies.” – Joseph Stalin
13. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” – Julius Caesar
14. “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” – Thomas Jefferson
15. “History never really says goodbye. History says, ‘See you later.'” – Eduardo Galeano
16. “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” – H. G. Wells
17. “History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.” – Mahmoud Darwish
18. “If you don’t know your history, you can’t know your future.” – Lenny Henry
19. “History never looks like history when you are living through it.” – John W. Gardner
20. “The people who have impacted the world didn’t live long. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. These people who impact the world were not old people, but they lived so effectively that we cannot erase them from history.” – Myles Munroe
21. “People that are really very weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.” – Dan Quayle
22. “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.” – George Bernard Shaw
23. “Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.” – Louis D. Brandeis
24. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” – Winston Churchill
25. “Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.” – Joan of Arc
When the Past Talks Back
History doesn’t stop.
It just waits for someone to quote it again.
Maybe that someone is you.
Hey fellow Linguaholics! It’s me, Marcel. I am the proud owner of linguaholic.com. Languages have always been my passion and I have studied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Sinology at the University of Zurich. It is my utmost pleasure to share with all of you guys what I know about languages and linguistics in general.