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.

In one thousand years of Russia’s existence, its first popular national election ever to be held occurred in June 1991. Six days later, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performed in Moscow!

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

All empires come to an end, and the American one is no exception.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.

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.

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

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

Science sent the Hubble telescope out into space, so it could capture light and the absence thereof, from the very beginning of time. And the telescope really did that. So now we know that there was once absolutely nothing, such a perfect nothing that there wasn’t even nothing or once.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.

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

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‚You’re better than the Cassius of old.‘

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

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

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

History should be written as philosophy.

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.

Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.

Space is almost infinite. As a matter of fact, we think it is infinite.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

In war there is no substitute for victory.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

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.

We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being, and born a man.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

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

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

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

The world is so unpredictable. Things happen suddenly, unexpectedly. We want to feel we are in control of our own existence. In some ways we are, in some ways we’re not. We are ruled by the forces of chance and coincidence.

The smaller the planets are, they are, other things being equal, of so much the greater density; for so the powers of gravity on their several surfaces come nearer to equality. They are likewise, other things being equal, of the greater density, as they are nearer to the sun.

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.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

It is rather for us here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

Even Hubble hasn’t found yet the end of this universe, and we don’t know that it has any end.

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

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.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

The name Zahra was to have been lman’s own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets and wonder when you are done that they do not delight in your company.

The whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.

At United, there are great traditions, which you can’t buy in one or two years. They are created by victories. You need to prove again and again that you are better than the others. Manchester United have always done this, and are still doing it, so they are the best.

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

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.

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 Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.