George Stillman Hillard Quotes

Great men are the inspired texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

A great man represents a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists of his being there.

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

If Lincoln is among history's truly great men, he didn't achieve that stature until his final three years. This was when his long-held antipathy to slavery cohered into a dedicated hostility that gave larger purpose to the Civil War and also confirmed the logic of Lincoln's destiny.

Great men are usually the products of their times and one of the men developed by these times takes rank with the greatest railroad leaders in history.

A great man is one who deliberately causes something important to a happen, the probability of which seemed low before he took up the task. A great man is a man who gives history a turn which it could scarcely have taken without him. They give history a twist which nobody would have predicted. Great men leave permanent effects.

History is simply a piece of paper covered with print; the main thing is still to make history, not to write it.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

You are the only man in history to every use the Presidency as a stepping stone to greatness.

Great men grow.

Great men are rarely isolated mountain peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

In America, we may acknowledge Washington and Lincoln as great men, and probably Franklin and Jefferson and maybe Franklin Delano Roosevelt and possibly even several more, but we would probably disagree about precisely what it was that made them great, what it was that enabled them to give a lasting direction to the course of events.

If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws, and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples, dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and the souls.

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

The history of the world is the history of a few men who had faith in themselves

All great men are partially inspired.

The world cannot do without great men, but great men are very troublesome to the world.

The great men of the earth are but the marking-stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion.

Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.

Great men exist that there might be greater men.

If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astonishing results are the three criteria of a human genius, who could dare compare any great man in history with Muhammad?

Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.

We live in a new and exceptional age. America is another word for Opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of the Divine Providence in behalf of the human race; and a literal, slavish following of precedents, as by a justice of the peace, is not for those who at this hour lead the AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.

Some princes are born in palaces. Some are born in mangers. But a few are born in the imagination, out of scraps of history and hope... Barack Hussein Obama did not win because of the color of his skin. Nor did he win in spite of it. He won because at a very dangerous moment in the life of a still young country, more people than have ever spoken before came together to try to save it. And that was a victory all its own.