Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

- Marge Piercy

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

- Anne Sullivan

History is important. If you don't know history it's as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything and you have no way of checking up on it.

- Howard Zinn

It is fair to assume that when women in the past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of talent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions.

- Anna Garlin Spencer

I would encourage us all, African Americans, Asians, Latinos, Whites, Native Americans to study history. I long for the time when all the human history is taught as one history. I am stronger because you are stronger. I am weaker if you are weak. So we are more alike than we are unlike. (source)

- Maya Angelou

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

- Melody Beattie

I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -- that history is a protective armor against being misled.

- Howard Zinn

It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.

- Howard Zinn

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

- Howard Zinn

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still further into antiquity, we shall find a directly contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and, if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other: but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right: we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him.

- Thomas Paine

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

I like dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

- Thomas Jefferson

I am passionately interested in understanding how my country works. And if you want to know about this thing called the United States of America you have to know about the Civil War.

- Ken Burns

Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anyone else.

- Heywood Broun

One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.

- Peace Pilgrim

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

- Aristotle



Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

- Plato



You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

- Arthur Ashe



If you don't know history, it is as if you were born yesterday.

- Howard Zinn



People like Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Jack London and Upton Sinclair were wonderful writers who joined the movement against war and injustice, against capitalism and corporate power. That was a very exciting period in American history.

- Howard Zinn



Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack ran so we all can fly.

- Unknown



This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

- Agathon



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



History is a race between education and catastrophe.

- H. G. Wells



The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.

- W. H. Auden



Certain periods in history suddenly lift humanity to an observation point where a clear light falls upon a world previously dark.

- Anne Sullivan



All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence...the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rather they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.

- Andre Trocme



We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

- George Bernard Shaw



I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

- Robert Fulghum



The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

- Margaret Bourke-White



I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.

- Vita Sackville-West



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



I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

- Denise Levertov



One faces the future with one's past.

- Pearl S. Buck



If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

- Baruch Spinoza



Study the past if you would define the future.

- Confucius



History is the science of what never happens twice.

- Paul Valery



A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

- Jawaharlal Nehru



There is properly no history; only biography.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

- Karl Marx



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

- David McCullough



From time to time historians need to be shocked.

- Peter Burke



Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

- Oscar Wilde



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

- Kurt Vonnegut



Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

- Benjamin Disraeli