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

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

In much of society, research means to investigate something you do not know or understand.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.

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.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

By curious accident of history and geography, the world’s major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

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

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

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

The unforgivable crime is soft hitting. Do not hit at all if it can be avoided; but never hit softly.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

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.

The British constitution has always been puzzling and always will be.

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.

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.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

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.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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

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

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin‘ now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

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

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

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.

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

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.

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.

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.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

London is a roost for every bird.

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

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

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

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.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

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.

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

The Medici created and destroyed me.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

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

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

Ever since the morning of May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and I became the first climbers to step onto the summit of Mount Everest, I’ve been called a great adventurer.

If I had a time machine, I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.