Born to a tribal Bedouin family of nomadic desert shepherds in the region of Tripoli, Gaddafi was profoundly anti-colonialist. It is affirmed that his paternal grandfather died fighting against the Italian invaders when Libya was invaded by them in 1911.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The most talented do not always end up as celebrities, and those with less talent often do. Upsets are written into our history and occur around us every day.

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

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

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

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

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.

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

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.

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

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

Of course, there is no question that Libya – and the world – will be better off with Gaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

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

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

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

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

What is past is prologue.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

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.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

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

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.‘

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

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

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

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

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 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.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

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

In war there is no substitute for victory.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.