The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

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

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.

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

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

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.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

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

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

There is a specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

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

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense human rights invented America.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

London is a roost for every bird.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

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.‘

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.

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.

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

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.

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.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

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.

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.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

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

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.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

The 21st century is going to be the American century. Because we lead not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. That is the history of the journey of America.

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

It’s a very good historical book about history.

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.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

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.

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.

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

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

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

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

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

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

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

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