historian quotes

Explore insightful quotes from prominent historians throughout history. Discover wisdom and perspective from those who study and document the past.

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

- Horace Walpole

Where there is power, there is resistance.

- Michel Foucault

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

- Michel Foucault

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

- Michel Foucault

The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

- Michel Foucault

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

- Michel Foucault

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

- Michel Foucault

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.

- Michel Foucault

I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

- Michel Foucault

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

- Michel Foucault

You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

- Michel Foucault

If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing.

- Michel Foucault

I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

- Michel Foucault

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

- Michel Foucault

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

- Edward Gibbon

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.

- Edward Gibbon

We improve ourselves by victories over ourself. There must be contests, and you must win.

- Edward Gibbon

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.

- Edward Gibbon

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

- Edward Gibbon

The history of empires is the history of human misery.

- Edward Gibbon