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.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

A kingdom founded on injustice never lasts.

I think with the Romans, that the general of today should be a soldier tomorrow if necessary.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.

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

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.

Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.

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

I had had a continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany.

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

All achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.

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 don’t have space to enter into the examples or the history of this, so I’m left with having to make the bold statement that culture is extinct.

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

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

By curious accident of history and geography, the world’s major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

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.

Empire and liberty.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

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.

Knowledge of the past and of the places of the earth is the ornament and food of the mind of man.

If you look back at the history of the twentieth century, Germany alone had practically destroyed Russia several times.

You do indeed have a past, but not now! And, yes, you have a future, but not now! You can consume your now with thoughts of ‚then‘ and ‚maybe,‘ but that will keep you from the inner peace you could experience.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.

The United States fully accepts the profound truth that our own progress, prosperity, and peace are interlocked with the progress, prosperity, and peace of all humanity.

Fear, separation, hate and anger come from the wrong view that you and the Earth are two separate entities, the Earth is only the environment. You are in the centre and you want to do something for the Earth in order for you to survive. That is a dualistic way of seeing.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

The titanic effort that has brought liberation to South Africa, and ensured the total liberation of Africa, constitutes an act of redemption for the black people of the world.

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

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

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

In history people dressed much better than we do today.

I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like – when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn’t look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that’s terrorism, too.

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

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.

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

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

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

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

In the 1940s, traveling for an African was a complicated process. All Africans over the age of sixteen were compelled to carry ‚Native passes‘ issued by the Native Affairs Department and were required to show that pass to any white policeman, civil servant, or employer. Failure to do so could mean arrest, trial, a jail sentence or fine.

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.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

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

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.