I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays.

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

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

Don’t just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

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

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

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.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

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.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

One is lucky to be born in a place where no one is doing it, because then you can say, ‚Well, obviously I can write better than everyone else in high school.‘ You have no idea of the competition.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

History has proven that each generation of Howard graduates will forge the way forward for our country and our world.

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

I’m tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.

I had not expected ‚A Brief History of Time‘ to be a best seller.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

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

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

I really wish I knew what I was doing because I’d be writing hit songs every minute.

Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

The Bible illustrated by Dore occupied many of my hours – and I think probably gave me many nightmares.

I’ve been writing my entire life, and I’ll always write.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

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

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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.

Since I have come to America, I am often asked whether my next novel will be set in America. I don’t think it will. I think I will be living in America for some time to come, but while living in America, I would like to write about Japanese society from the outside.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I don’t read ‚chick lit,‘ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

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

I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

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