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

I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning can only produce writing that matches what they do. And that includes me.

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.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

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.

In any court-like environment of power, you will inevitably find people who are drawn to those who are successful or powerful, not out of admiration, but out of secret envy.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

One of the good things about the way the Gulf War ended in 1991 is, you’d see the Vietnam veterans marching with the Gulf War veterans.

It’s never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn’t know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry ‚Native passes‘ issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.

Once the automobile appeared you could have predicted that it would destroy as many people as it did.

We should understand the source of our authority and something of the keys that control its power.

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.

Every action has a consequence. It may be good for strengthening. And I have no doubt that lifting a lot of weights can get you stronger. I just don’t know if lifting stronger weights can keep you healthy, or it can keep you doing your job better, especially for a pro athlete.

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that’s important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.

It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving – as if it were an individual person – its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.

Music has the power to inspire the world.

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.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

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

I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.

For me, education was power.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

The three most powerful and most apparent means used by Rome to retain her power over the minds of her votaries are Ignorance, Superstition, and Persecution.

If you were to ask me to choose between democratic values and wealth, power, prosperity and fame, I will very easily and without any doubt choose democratic values.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.

Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.

The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn’t want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

Gambling can turn into a dangerous two-way street when you least expect it. Weird things happen suddenly, and your life can go all to pieces.

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.

You quickly find, when you are a hand-reader as I am, that nothing interests people so much as themselves.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

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.

We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‚crash‘ when we tried to use them.

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

A friend in power is a friend lost.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

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

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

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

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

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

If the people are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the rest. We conclude that to be good from whence good is derived.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Social 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.