You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
George EliotDe Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Aldous HuxleyThose parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.
Thomas SowellSocial 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.
Fidel CastroIt has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.
Abraham LincolnI love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.
Alice WalkerEurope was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
Margaret ThatcherI have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.
Abraham LincolnThe 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.
Elon MuskI perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.
Abraham LincolnYup, the whole birther movement was racist.
Colin PowellI cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.
Jackie RobinsonMy parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.
Madeleine AlbrightThe 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.
Noam ChomskyThe greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C. ClarkeThe whole history of pop music had rested on the first person singular, with occasional intrusions of the second person singular.
Brian EnoEvery age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.
Jean-Paul SartreLeadership is absolutely vital if there are comparable countries which can affect the security of the world you live in. Between Lincoln and Roosevelt’s time, America was protected by huge oceans and, in practice, by the British navy. Today, it’s different, and the obsession of the Obama administration has been for retrenchment.
Henry KissingerI should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?
Abraham LincolnSometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.
Thomas JeffersonPropaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
Alice WalkerNeither 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.
Dwight D. EisenhowerThe Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.
Noam ChomskyThe greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.
Richard M. NixonIn ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
Terry PratchettI have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.
Abraham LincolnI was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21 because he promised to get us out of the Korean War.
Clint EastwoodCreating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other ‚studies‘ was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these ‚studies‘ are about propaganda rather than serious education.
Thomas SowellThe aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‚eternity‘; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
Friedrich NietzscheWhen the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
Desmond TutuThe 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.
Bill GatesWar had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.
Jane GoodallMen do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Aldous HuxleySkepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.
Napoleon BonaparteThe only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.
Noam ChomskyIn 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.
Alan WattsWar is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
Winston ChurchillSo far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the constitution of India. My government will not tolerate or accept any discrimination based on caste, creed and religion.
Narendra ModiI’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.
Brian EnoI detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.
Nelson MandelaI was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go… It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‚Wait a second? Didn’t we just get through with that?‘
Clint EastwoodI have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
Desmond TutuHistory isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
C. S. LewisI feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.
Kanye WestEvery writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki MurakamiWoz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history.
Steve JobsI’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.
Noam ChomskyYes, 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.
Joel OsteenHistory, a distillation of rumour.
Thomas CarlyleI think what you’re seeing is a profound recognition on the part of the American people that gays and lesbians and transgender persons are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our cousins, our friends, our co-workers, and that they’ve got to be treated like every other American. And I think that principle will win out.
Barack ObamaPoetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
AristotleThe 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.
Dalai LamaMy experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.
Michelle ObamaThe revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.
Elon MuskI had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.
J. Robert OppenheimerHistorically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinWhite people just don’t want their slaves to be free. That’s the whole thing.
Muhammad AliTo study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.
Hermann HesseThose who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.
Noam ChomskyIn 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!
Russell M. Nelson