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

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.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

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

I think the FBI is the premier law enforcement agency in all of human history.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

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.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I 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.

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

History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

I was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. I estimate, however, that about two hundred thousand other babies were also born that day. I don’t know whether any of them was later interested in astronomy.

How many emperors and how many princes have lived and died and no record of them remains, and they only sought to gain dominions and riches in order that their fame might be ever-lasting.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they’d always known – the plantations – because they attempted to exercise their ‚democratic‘ right to vote.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

You go back to the 17th century, the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India.

Treachery has existed as long as there’s been warfare, and there’s always been a few people that you couldn’t trust.

Canada was built on dead beavers.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.

When Hillary was First Lady, we went to the Beijing Women’s Conference. She courageously stood up and spoke out on behalf of human rights and women’s rights, inspiring millions to fight for a better future.

In the ’70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.

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

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

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

It’s a very good historical book about history.

The best thing about my protest has been to see how more and more people have been coming and getting involved.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever country, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts.

The 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.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

You can rebel in different ways. Civil disobedience is rebelling. As long as it’s peaceful, of course.

Cuba came to be the last country to get rid of Spanish colonialism and the first to shake off the heinous imperialist tutelage.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it’s how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something.

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

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.

History, a distillation of rumour.

To our critical eyes, the threads of which the past is woven are, by nature, endless and indivisible. Scientifically speaking, we cannot grasp the absolute beginning of anything: everything extends backwards to be prolonged by something else.

I 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.

The making of an American begins at the point where he himself rejects all other ties, any other history, and himself adopts the vesture of his adopted land.

The idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling theory.

The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them when they are invaded.

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

I knew when my career was over. In 1965 my baseball card came out with no picture.

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

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

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

When I look back on what I did for the Left, I’m in a small way quite proud of some of it – I only wish I’d done more.