History, a distillation of rumour.

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the ‚Dust and Ashes Act,‘ any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

What is past is prologue.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

Stupidity is a talent for misconception.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought.

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

Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Fame is a fickle food upon a shifting plate.

Truth is weirder than any fiction I’ve seen.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

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.

Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see that a reporter could do much to a president, do you?

Fame is but the breath of people, and that often unwholesome.

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.

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.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

I became a Republican in 1951, the first year I could vote.

I had nearly finished school because I was making effort not that bad on that. But there was a law in Germany after the war. You could not make your final examination before 18, so lots of people who were late because of the way had to do it first.

In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

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.

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

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

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

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign, and wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

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.

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.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

The ‚free-floating intellectual‘ may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

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

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

There’s no doubt that inequality destabilizes societies. I think the social science evidence on that front is crystal clear.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

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

Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

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

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

The worst of madmen is a saint run mad.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.