shaping history Quotes

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore - on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium.

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

My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silence and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated.

Imagine a history teacher making history.

Make history or be a part of it.

They say that 'history is an argument without end.' In Thompson's skillful hands, this momentous argument between two old friends on the most critical issue of the last century is thus history at its best. Thompson's judicious and delicious depiction of Nitze and Kennan will fascinate anyone who cares about the Cold War or the ways that human beings shape the future.

History marched to the drums of a clear idea...

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

After I am dead I would like people to say: 'Beuys understood the historical situation. He altered the course of events'. I hope in the right direction.

Schlesinger was that rare thing, a historian and a maker of history.

Men make history. History does not make the man.

We have a responsibility in our time, as others have had in theirs, not to be prisoners of history but to shape history, a responsibility to fill the role of path-finder, and to build with others a global network of purpose and law.

History should not be left to the historians. Rather, be like Churchill. Make history, and then write it.

From the start, the nation’s history has been weighted with a sense of great destiny and huge meaning, of visions not found on the fringes of the story but at its very core, actively shaping the minds of those who make history and those who write about it.

We are not merely passive pawns of historical forces; nor are we victims of the past. We can shape and direct history.

Because as tough as things have been, I am convinced you are tougher. I've seen your passion and I've seen your service... I've seen a generation eager, impatient even, to step into the rushing waters of history and change its course.

The teacher, whether mother, priest, or schoolmaster, is the real maker of history.

Only a handful of men and women leave an imprint on the conscience of a nation and on the history that they helped shape.

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

Whence had they come The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome? What sacred drama through her body heaved When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it.

Events are only the shells of ideas; and often it is the fluent thought of ages that is crystallized in a moment by the stroke of a pen or the point of a bayonet.

World War II is the war that made our world. There's no question about that. The history of all the years in which I will spend my life, every single one, that is the seminal event of the history that we will experience.

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.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.