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

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.

The U.N. bureaucracy has grown to elephantine proportions. Now that the Cold War is over, we are asking that elephant to do gymnastics.

I think we’ve taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don’t stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and – for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

Remember that creating a successful marriage is like farming: you have to start over again every morning.

John Dalton’s records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.

I don’t really focus on these things – on what tags are given to me or what people think of me off the field – stuff like that. My main focus is always to do well on the field for the Indian cricket team. When people say good things about me off the field, I am more than happy to accept them.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

I can’t help the way you was born if you was gay.

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‚Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?‘ We must always consider the person.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

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.

Born to a tribal Bedouin family of nomadic desert shepherds in the region of Tripoli, Gaddafi was profoundly anti-colonialist. It is affirmed that his paternal grandfather died fighting against the Italian invaders when Libya was invaded by them in 1911.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.

When my ancestors came from Africa, they were shackled by our neck, our wrists, and our ankles in steel chains. I’ve turned those steel chains into gold to symbolize the fact that I’m still a slave, only my price tag is higher.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

Change in all things is sweet.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.

Rioting is a childish way of trying to be a man, but it takes time to rise out of the hell of hatred and frustration and accept that to be a man you don’t have to riot.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

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.

The name Zahra was to have been lman’s own name at birth, but a senior member of the family changed it to lman at the last minute.

In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

I still close my eyes and go home – I can always draw from that.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

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.

I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

To innovate is not to reform.

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see, Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

If you wish to forget anything on the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people’s eyes before you even put out an album.