De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

We must always remember that the Chinese revolution was not a peasant’s revolution, but one of the extreme Right.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

Here’s what I believe, I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in the history of the world but i think there was some bad apples over there.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible that in any profane history.

I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

London is a roost for every bird.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?