How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

In the United States, I am a great success, but I am not a celebrity.

What is past is prologue.

When you decide to get involved in a military operation in a place like Syria, you’ve got to be prepared, as we learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, to become the government, and I’m not sure any country, either the United States or I don’t hear of anyone else, who’s willing to take on that responsibility.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

If you’re low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

I don’t know that there is much the United States can do except work with the international community.

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that – children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.

When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

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!

In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.

The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam.

You get a lawyer whether you’re in a military tribunal or whether you’re in a federal court, number one. The attorney general decided that the court with the biggest – with the greatest venue, with the best jurisdiction was the New York court. That was the right decision to make.

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.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

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.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

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.

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.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

Illinois surpasses every other spot of equal extent upon the face of the globe in fertility of soil and in the proportionable amount of the same which is sufficiently level for actual cultivation.

The White House is the finest prison in the world.

The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or ’79.

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

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.

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.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

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

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

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.

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

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

Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States.

I was a proponent of the ERA. The women of my generation and my daughter’s generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.

For me, America is really, truly the indispensable nation.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

We have the oldest written constitution still in force in the world, and it starts out with three words, ‚We, the people.‘

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

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

The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.

A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim.

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.

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

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.