Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

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.

As capitalism falters, the rich move their money out of the country, violence increases, and politicians promising prosperity are elected.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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

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

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

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.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation, and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews.

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

I’ll beat him so bad he’ll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

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

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

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.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

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’ve had just about everything punched. I’ve had things grabbed that just shouldn’t be grapped.

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.

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

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

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.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence. It is also a course of action that strikes a blow against the regime of international order, but which offers the weak at least some protection from predatory states.

Everybody has a job to do. There are people in Iraq on both sides of this war who do what they do for religious reasons, and they feel with God on their side. Some people are good at annihilating people. Maybe that’s their gift.

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

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

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

Justice is an unassailable fortress, built on the brow of a mountain which cannot be overthrown by the violence of torrents, nor demolished by the force of armies.

Hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture.

History should be written as philosophy.

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.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

Jewelry and pins have been worn throughout history as symbols of power, sending messages. Interestingly enough, it was mostly men who wore the jewelry in various times, and obviously crowns were part of signals that were being sent throughout history by people of rank.

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

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

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

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.

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.‘

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.

Deliberate violence is more to be quenched than a fire.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

I said I would never wear my gold again because it would be insensitive and disrespectful to all the people who died and lost everything in Katrina.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.