Jonathan Swift Quotes

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may.

I loved history because to me, history was like watching a movie.

I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

I actually do think the history is so epic that it actually kind of writes itself.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college.

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

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

Writers are the main landmarks of the past.

History is a big word... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

I love history. I'm very interested by it and I think it's great to have a movie that brings it alive in a way. It's sort of that romanticized version of it.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

O ye dead Poets, who are living still Immortal in your verse, though life be fled, And ye, O living Poets, who are dead Though ye are living, if neglect can kill, Tell me if in the darkest hours of ill, With drops of anguish falling fast and red From the sharp crown of thorns upon your head, Ye were not glad your errand to fulfill?

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

The men who make history have not time to write it.

All poets pretend to write for immortality, but the whole tribe have no objection to present pay, and present praise. Lord Burleigh is not the only statesman who has thought one hundred pounds too much for a song, though sung by Spenser; although Oliver Goldsmith is the only poet who ever considered himself to have been overpaid.

Men make history. History does not make the man.

Slowly but without question - and Presidents' Day is only one example - Americans are forgetting and ignoring the men and events that have made this nation great.