Harry S. Truman Quotes

Men make history, not the other way around.

He is the resounding human rebuttal to all Marxist historians who think history is the story of vast and impersonal economic forces. The point of the Churchill Factor is that one man can make all the difference.

I've always maintained that it isn't the form that's going to make the difference. It isn't the rule or the procedure or the ideology, but it's human beings that will make it.

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden source in individuals.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

Laws provide against injury from others. God himself will not save men against their wills.

World history is shaped both positively and negatively by people who judge.

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

I do tend to look at individuals and whether they do or do not matter in history.

We are still masters of our fate. We are still captains of our souls.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him.

After all, the world is not our handiwork, and we are not responsible for what goes on in it, save within very narrow limits.

Instead of saying that man is the creature of circumstance, it would be nearer the mark to say that man is the architect of circumstance.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.

It is our decisions not our conditions that determine our quality of life.

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen just as one cannot see grass growing.

I'd like to say that people... people can change anything they want to; and that means everything in the world. Show me any country and there'll be people in it. And it's the people that make the country. People have got to stop pretending they're not on the world... It's time to take that humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time... Think on that. Without people you're nothing.

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes-within the limits of endowment and environment-he has made out of himself.

My conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.

You play a part in every aspect of your life going the way you want or not going the way that you want. It has very little to do with other people.

We do not what we ought; What we ought not, we do; And lean upon the thought That chance will bring us through; But our own acts, for good or ill, are mightier powers.

Each person can make their difference.