Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

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

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.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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 are four Powers: memory and intellect, desire and covetousness. The two first are mental and the others sensual. The three senses: sight, hearing and smell cannot well be prevented; touch and taste not at all.

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.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

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.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

America has fought five wars since 1945 and has gained its objectives in only one of them, the Gulf War.

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.

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

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

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.

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.

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.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Kindnesses are easily forgotten; but injuries! what worthy man does not keep those in mind?

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

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.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

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

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.

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 got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

In one thousand years of Russia’s existence, its first popular national election ever to be held occurred in June 1991. Six days later, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed in Moscow!

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

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.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

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

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.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

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

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I do sometimes look back at things I’ve written in the past, and think, ‚I just don’t remember being the person who wrote that.‘

The United States never lost a war or won a conference.

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

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

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

I never heard of an old man forgetting where he had buried his money! Old people remember what interests them: the dates fixed for their lawsuits, and the names of their debtors and creditors.

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.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.