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

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history – revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

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

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

What is past is prologue.

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

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

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

I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.

Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.

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.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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.

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

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.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

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.

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

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

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.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

History is more or less bunk.

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.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

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

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

At the outset, I want to say that the suggestion that the struggle in South Africa is under the influence of foreigners or communists is wholly incorrect. I have done whatever I did because of my experience in South Africa and my own proudly felt African background, and not because of what any outsider might have said.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

Don’t hire a prison consultant.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

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.

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.

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

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

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

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.

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

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

It’s a very good historical book about history.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

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.

No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America, there are no white or colored signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.

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

History is a set of lies agreed upon.