From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

What is past is prologue.

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

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

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.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Empire and liberty.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

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

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

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.‘

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Don’t hire a prison consultant.

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.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

I was first imprisoned in Pretoria, and then, thereafter, I was taken to Robben Island. I stayed there for a couple of weeks. I was taken back to Pretoria when I was charged in the Rivonia trial, when I was then sent to Robben Island for life.

The ideals and principles for which Dr King fought have never been forgotten and are as relevant today as they were 40 years ago.

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

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‚You’re better than the Cassius of old.‘

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.

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

I liberate minds with my music. That’s more important than liberating a few people from apartheid or whatever.

If I had a time machine, I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

I think our politicians could learn a lot from Mandela.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.