I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

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

Sports are basically our way of feeling sorry for ourselves. Most men can’t become athletes. We’re watching guys who actually made it. We see them dunking and making touchdowns. Then we think about ourselves when we were younger.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

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.

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

The future of advertising is the Internet.

We can fear things into existence. Fear looks into the future and imagines the worst that can happen.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

I’m seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There’s no black and white to it. But sometimes I’m seeing it like I’m 4.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

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

Therefore I am sure that this, my Coronation, is not the symbol of a power and a splendor that are gone but a declaration of our hopes for the future, and for the years I may, by God’s Grace and Mercy, be given to reign and serve you as your Queen.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

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.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won’t be a world – at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

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.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Why don’t you start believing that no matter what you have or haven’t done, that your best days are still out in front of you.

We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

North Americans don’t understand… that our country is not just Cuba; our country is also humanity.

Life’s a bit like mountaineering – never look down.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.

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

A pessimist? That’s a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

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 history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

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.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.