H. Rider Haggard Quotes

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

Things always happen in series.

Because of the active principle and spirit or universal soul, nothing is so incomplete, defective or imperfect, or, according to common opinion, so completely insignificant that it could not become the source of great events.

There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.

A very small cause which escapes our notice determines a considerable effect that we cannot fail to see, and then we say that the effect is due to chance.

Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led ot contemplate the great events that have run parallel with and have just closed the last.

The most profound moments in politics usually happen unexpectedly.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.

What's crazy about my life is that the biggest things that have happened just happen.

No one is in charge of this process, this is what makes history so interesting, it's a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

There are two consequences in history; an immediate one, which is instantly recognized, and one in the distance, which is not at first perceived. These consequences often contradict each other; ... look to the end of an accomplished fact, and you will see that it has always produced the contrary of what was expected from it.

The first springs of great events, like those of great rivers, are often mean and little.

He picked up the letter Q and hurled it into a distant privet bush where it hit a young rabbit. The rabbit hurtled off in terror and didn’t stop till it was set upon and eaten by a fox which choked on one of its bones and died on the bank of a stream which subsequently washed it away. During the following weeks Ford Perfect swallowed his pride and struck up a relationship with a girl who had been a personnel officer on Golgafrincham, and he was terribly upset when she suddenly passed away as a result of drinking water from a pool that had been polluted by the body of a dead fox.

Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.

Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, and that the pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental.