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.

For 2,500 years, India has never invaded anybody.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

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

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

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.

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

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.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

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.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

Hate and force cannot be in just a part of the world without having an effect on the rest of it.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

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.

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

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.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

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

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‚Let us pray.‘ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

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 state the facts frankly is not to despair the future nor indict the past. The prudent heir takes careful inventory of his legacies and gives a faithful accounting to those whom he owes an obligation of trust.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

The most talented do not always end up as celebrities, and those with less talent often do. Upsets are written into our history and occur around us every day.

If you can feel that Mother Earth is in you, and you are Mother Earth, then you are not any longer afraid to die because the earth is not dying. Like a wave appears and disappears and appears again.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

I have a wish. It as a fear as well – that in my end will be my beginning.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

The revolutionary breakthrough will come with rockets that are fully and rapidly reusable. We will never conquer Mars unless we do that. It’ll be too expensive. The American colonies would never have been pioneered if the ships that crossed the ocean hadn’t been reusable.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God’s word to justify bigotry and persecution.

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

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.