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 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.

London is a roost for every bird.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

I always love going on a safari drive whenever I visit Ulusaba Private Game Reserve in South Africa. I’ve been fortunate to see so many incredible animals over the years, and each time, it’s completely different. Following Ulusaba’s pack of wild dogs is my highlight.

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.

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.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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

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.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

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

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.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

What is past is prologue.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

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.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

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.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

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.

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

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

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.

If I were a Negro, I’d be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I’d rather go down with my flag flying. If you’re weak or crippled, or you can’t speak out or fight back in some way, then people don’t hesitate to treat you badly.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

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

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

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

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

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

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 Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

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.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.