I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

I don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

Capitalism is using its money; we socialists throw it away.

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.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

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

It’s in the best interest of the radical left types – best psychological and strategic interest – to refuse to admit to the possibility that reasonable people can object to their ideological staff. Because if reasonable people objected, that would imply that their ideological stance is not reasonable.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

I’m not a conservative of any kind.

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

Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

Social struggles have been taking place throughout millennia, since human beings, by resorting to wars, were able to take hold of a surplus production to satisfy the essential needs of life.

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

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.

Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

What we all want is public safety. We don’t want rhetoric that’s framed through ideology.

I became a Communist by studying capitalist political economy, and when I had some understanding of that problem, it actually seemed to me so absurd, so irrational, so inhuman, that I simply began to elaborate on my own formulas for production and distribution.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

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

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

Well, Marx is having a comeback. I hear him mentioned a lot in terms of the global financial situation and the general sense of injustice out there. A lot of economic experts in America refer to him without actually using the M word, but he’s around.

Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.

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

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

It’s time to stop thinking of the Republican Party as an exclusive club where your ideological card is checked at the door, and start thinking about how we can attract more solution-based leaders like Nathan Fletcher and Anthony Adams.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

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.

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.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity – or it will move apart.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

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.

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.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

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

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.