If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

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

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.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

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.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Alas, I am dying beyond my means.

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

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

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

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

In remembering the appalling suffering of war on both sides, we recognise how precious is the peace we have built in Europe since 1945.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

You accept that this civilisation could be abolished and life will begin later on after a few thousand years because that is something that has happened in the history of this planet. When you have peace in yourself and accept, then you are calm enough to do something, but if you are carried by despair there is no hope.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn’t give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

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

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

Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

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.

History is written by the victors.

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

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.

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

I don’t know which will go first – rock ‚n‘ roll or Christianity.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

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.

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.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

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

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

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.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.

There is no austerity equal to a balanced mind, and there is no happiness equal to contentment; there is no disease like covetousness, and no virtue like mercy.