The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

I’ve never doubted that apartheid – because it was of itself fundamentally, intrinsically evil – was going to bite the dust eventually.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

The great defense against the air menace is to attack the enemy’s aircraft as near as possible to their point of departure.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history – revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

London is a roost for every bird.

If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

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

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

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.

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

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Ever since I first came here in 1963 to fight Henry Cooper, I have loved the people of England.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.