Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Those 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.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

Nothing stands out so conspicuously, or remains so firmly fixed in the memory, as something which you have blundered.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

In the 1960s, there was a point, 1968, ’69, when there was a very strong antiwar movement against the war in Vietnam. But it’s worth remembering that the war in Vietnam started – an outright war started in 1962.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

When I’m on stage, it’s really intense. My mind is going a million miles an hour, trying to remember my act, trying to say it all the right way. It’s funny how different it looks and how it’s happening. There are three Fellini circuses in my head, and outwardly it looks like I’m going to get a bagel.

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.

History shows that, more often than not, loss of sovereignty leads to liberalisation imposed in the interests of the powerful.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

Historically, the family has played the primary role in educating children for life, with the school providing supplemental scaffolding to the family.

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.

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

We can all be successful and make money, but when we die, that ends. But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

Holes in the memory. You grab on to some things, others have completely disappeared.

I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I’d invented it, because it is very true.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Some may remember, if you have good memories, that there used to be a concept in Anglo-American law called a presumption of innocence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Now that’s so deep in history that there’s no point even bringing it up, but it did once exist.

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

Nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him.

Every 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.

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

Woz 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.

A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.

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

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the ‚Dust and Ashes Act,‘ any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

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

The 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.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

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.

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form.

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

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

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

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.

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.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

My mind doesn’t work, my memories don’t work like a computer file where I can just retrieve them and, boy, there it is. My mind is selective in terms of memories. When I try to think back to college or high school, there are gaps. I try to fill them in. But I can’t tell you it’s always the truth.

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

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.

The memory of that scene for me is like a frame of film forever frozen at that moment: the red carpet, the green lawn, the white house, the leaden sky. The new president and his first lady.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

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