Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

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.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

Freedom is a man’s natural power of doing what he pleases, so far as he is not prevented by force or law.

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.

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

As social animals, we are extremely susceptible to the moods of other people. This gives us the power to subtly infuse into people the appropriate mood for influencing them.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

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

We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children’s children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to His Word.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

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.

We are not punished for our sins, but by them.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

I’ve got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.

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

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.

Man is the most intelligent of the animals – and the most silly.

Force always attracts men of low morality.

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

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

Time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee… I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

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

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

I was sure I’d set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth – that I hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if ‚The Big Trail‘ had been a success and launched me as a star.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

But if you – if what – the reports are true, what they’re saying is, is that as a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that’s going to increase our costs, we knew that.

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

When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.

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.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

If we want to reduce poverty and misery, if we want to give to every deserving individual what is needed for a safe existence of an intelligent being, we want to provide more machinery, more power. Power is our mainstay, the primary source of our many-sided energies.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

The most talented do not always end up as celebrities, and those with less talent often do. Upsets are written into our history and occur around us every day.

I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

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

My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe.

We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.

Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

It is good taste, and good taste alone, that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

When you feel like it’s too hard to obey God, remember that He will never tell you to do something without giving you the grace, power and ability to do it.

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.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.