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.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

History is more or less bunk.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

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.

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.

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

After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

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

The working men, I’ll go by and they’ll whistle. At first they whistle because they think, ‚Oh, it’s a girl. She’s got blond hair and she’s not out of shape,‘ and then they say, ‚Gosh, it’s Marilyn Monroe!‘

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.

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

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have never had plastic surgery, and there are many pop singers who have.

Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

And yet it moves.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

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

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

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

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.

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

I became a Republican in 1951, the first year I could vote.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

Madam President, speaking here in Dublin Castle it is impossible to ignore the weight of history, as it was yesterday when you and I laid wreaths at the Garden of Remembrance.

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

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

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

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.

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.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

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

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

I’m afraid the SS’s relationship with the Catholic Church is something the Church still has to deal with and does not deny.

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?

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.

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

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.

Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was only a greater Birmingham.

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

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.