I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons.

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.

The earth is bountiful, and where her bounty fails, nitrogen drawn from the air will refertilize her womb. I developed a process for this purpose in 1900. It was perfected fourteen years later under the stress of war by German chemists.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Contention does not usually begin as strife between countries. More often, it starts with an individual, for we can contend within ourselves over simple matters of right and wrong. From there, contention can infect neighbors and nations like a spreading sore.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.

Wars are not paid for in wartime, the bill comes later.

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.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

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

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

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – meaning primarily the United States – come down to two fundamental issues: ‚What are the accepted and applicable ‚rules of world order,‘ and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?‘

If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for War.

I don’t think the war in Afghanistan was ruthlessly enough waged.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

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

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

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

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

Morality is contraband in war.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

This was not an act of terrorism, but it was an act of war.

In 1993, Israel and North Korea were moving towards an agreement in which North Korea would stop sending any missiles or military technology to the Middle East and Israel would recognize that country. President Clinton intervened and blocked it.

War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

A lot has happened over the years. And while this nation has been tested by war, and it’s been tested by recession and all manner of challenges – I stand before you again tonight, after almost two terms as your president, to tell you I am more optimistic about the future of America than ever before.

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.

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

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary – public authority, just cause, right motive.

Politics is the womb in which war develops.

Organized murder is war, and though we demonstrate against a particular war, the nuclear, or any other kind of war, we have never demonstrated against war.

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

To secure peace is to prepare for war.

Whatever final judgment awaits ‚Bush v. Gore‘ in the annals of history, I am certain that the good work and good faith of the U.S. federal judiciary as a whole will continue to sustain public confidence at a level never beyond repair.

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

Prime Minister Maliki, released from American restraint, acted on his worst instincts, creating enormous distrust in Iraq’s Kurdish population and deeply embittering Sunnis in western Iraq’s Al Anbar, who lost any confidence in a Baghdad government they saw as adversarial.

England is a nation of shopkeepers.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.

We all recognize that the Mid-east is dissolving into crises, and we know terrorism did not start with 9-11.

War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.

I understand how every healthy child, every new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and I’m not an expert on how you get out of those things.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

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

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.

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.

There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of peace, no one would have known his name.