Quotes about History

My principles enable me to form my judgment upon men and actions in history, just as they do in common life, and are not formed out of events and characters, either present or past. History is a preceptor of prudence, not of principles. The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will, admit of any other.

It was not English arms, but the English Constitution, that conquered Ireland.

In history, a great volume is unravelled for our instruction, drawing materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

Once at Golgotha where he would be crucified, the people continued their festival of shame, not knowing that their attempts to heap shame on the Creator God were the most disgraceful acts in human history.

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Bauer 's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.

Jesus was called to throw himself on the wheel of world history, so that, even though it crushed him, it might start to turn in the opposite direction. Tom Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 69.