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.

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.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

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!

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

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.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

History 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.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

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.

The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

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.

There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War.

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

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything.

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

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

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.

We come bulletproof in Ireland. We’re reared tough, and we fight.

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

It 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.

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.

On October 15, 1965, an estimated 70,000 people took part in large-scale anti-war demonstrations.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

War 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.

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

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.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.

Let’s teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

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

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.

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

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

Ultimately, a real understanding of history means that we face nothing new under the sun.

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

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

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

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‚We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.‘

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

People are always coming up to me and saying, ‚I heard your dad’s speech, and it’s really great.‘ And they’ll mention some place I didn’t even know my dad was going to.

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

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.

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

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

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

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.