There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

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

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways – either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength. Thanks to the teachings of Buddha, I have been able to take this second way.

Contention existed before the earth was formed.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

We are proud of the history of our country; we learned it in school and have grown up hearing of freedom, justice and human rights.

Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot – past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

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

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.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.

The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock.

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

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

What is past is prologue.

History is present in all my novels. And whether I am directly talking about the sociological moment or just immersing my character in the environment, I am very aware of it.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

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

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.

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

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

History is written by the victors.

We all remember Abraham Lincoln as the leader who saved our Union. Founder of the Republican Party.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

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.

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

The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia – that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

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

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

I can’t explain 9/11, except the evil of man.

Read about history, and you become aware that nothing starts with us.

London is a roost for every bird.

Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example.

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

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

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

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.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

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.

When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.

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.

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

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.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

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

The existing world economic order constitutes a system of plundering and exploitation like no other in history. Thus, the peoples believe less and less in statements and promises.

By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.

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

I’ve got nothing against records – I’ve spent my life making them – but they are a kind of historical blip.

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

I’ve been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan’s vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

Unlike Europe, China can’t be intimidated. Europe backs down if the United States looks at it the wrong way. But China, they’ve been there for 3,000 years and are paying no attention to the barbarians and don’t see any need to.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.