Oscar Wilde Quotes on History
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Art persists, it timelessly continues.
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Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes his biography.
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The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
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The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
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The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
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The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
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Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
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The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
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In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.
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America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between (also attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Georges Clemenceau).