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.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged.

I don’t know who invented high heels, but all women owe him a lot.

I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.

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.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

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.

Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history; it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

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

We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe.

Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

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

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

We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.

I perhaps ought to say that individually I never was much interested in the Texas question. I never could see much good to come of annexation, inasmuch as they were already a free republican people on our own model.

If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Even though I’ve been putting out bodies of work for years, ‚Beauty Behind the Madness‘ felt like the beginning.

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‚Look, here’s what happened.‘

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

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.

NATO has been a thread throughout my life.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

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.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.

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.

True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

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.

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

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

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.

History should be written as philosophy.

World War II broke out in 1939, and many people credit that war with saving the economy.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.

It has so happened in all ages of the world that some have labored, and others have, without labor, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits.

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

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.

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.

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

Jewelry and pins have been worn throughout history as symbols of power, sending messages. Interestingly enough, it was mostly men who wore the jewelry in various times, and obviously crowns were part of signals that were being sent throughout history by people of rank.

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.

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.

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.

We’re a blip in the existence of the universe, and we’re constantly trying to pull each other down. Not doing things to help each other.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

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.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

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

To destroy is always the first step in any creation.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute.