Richard Nixon Quotes

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

History won't let go of us. We're pinned to it.

Nobody can stop the progress of history.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

Love cannot save you from your own fate.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Fate keeps on happening.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Whatever comes from God is impossible for a man to turn back.

Mother Nature is the great equalizer. You can't get away from it.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

Ill habits gather unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

Put two ships in the open sea, without wind or tide, and, at last, they will come together. Throw two planets into space, and they will fall one on the other. Place two enemies in the midst of a crowd, and they will inevitably meet; it is a fatality, a question of time; that is all.

Fate gives you the finger and you accept.

Everything that goes up must come down. But there comes a time when not everything that's down can come up.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

History isn’t just what happened before we came on the scene. We are a part of history..