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

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

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

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

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

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

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.

What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favour of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today.

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

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.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

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.

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.

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.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.

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.

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ‚among the most unspeakable crimes in history.‘ I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

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

Acorns were good until bread was found.

President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

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.

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

London is a roost for every bird.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

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

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

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

Repeal the Missouri Compromise – repeal all compromises – repeal the Declaration of Independence – repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man’s heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

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

Returning to your family and where you came from, and your history… this is what makes you strong. It’s not looking out that’s going to do that – it’s looking in.

I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don’t have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

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

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

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000 mph.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

History isn’t just the story of bad people doing bad things. It’s quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.