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

History is written by the victors.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

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

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

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

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

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.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

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

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

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.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

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

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.

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

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

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 is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

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.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

In the ’70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

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.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

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.

The Bible is full of warnings about false prophets and false messiahs. These satanically inspired people have appeared in almost every generation of history.

Leadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

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.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

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.

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

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

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.

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

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

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

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.