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.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

The United States is not stingy. We are the greatest contributor to international relief efforts in the world.

I consider myself to be as informed on American foreign policy as anyone in America.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

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.

We can’t afford not to educate girls and give women the power and the access that they need.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

‚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.

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

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

Remember that before ‚Roe v. Wade‘ was decided, there were four states that allowed abortion in the first trimester if that’s what the woman sought: New York, Hawaii, California, Alaska. Other states were shifting. And people were fighting over this issue in state legislatures.

I think America has always been polarized.

The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every calling, is diligence.

The United States is definitely ahead in culture of innovation. If someone wants to accomplish great things, there is no better place than the U.S.

The White House is the finest prison in the world.

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.

Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

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

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

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

I don’t have freedom in the United States to go into a public school and preach the Gospel, nor is a student free in a public school to pray, or a teacher free to read the Bible publicly to the students. At the same time, we have a great degree of freedom for which I am grateful.

When I came to Johannesburg from the countryside, I knew nobody, but many strangers were very kind to me. I then was dragged into politics, and then, subsequently, I became a lawyer.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

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

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.

Japan is an important ally of ours. Japan and the United States of the Western industrialized capacity, 60 percent of the GNP, two countries. That’s a statement in and of itself.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

By curious accident of history and geography, the world’s major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

Why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

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.

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

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

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

I did go to Wellesley, a women’s college. And I am of a kind of strange generation which is transitional in terms of women who wanted to go out and get jobs.

I’ve never been a feminist.

In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

Hate crime is not new in the United States.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

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.

Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got.

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.