To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

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.

Life is wasted on the living.

Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Liverpool is a club with a big, big, big history, and all the clubs in the world have a big history if the present is not too successful. If you have never had success, then nobody knows how it is, but in Liverpool, everybody knows how it was.

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

When I arrived in Laos and found young Americans living there, out of free choice, I was surprised. After only a week, I began to have a sense of the appeal of the country and its people – along with despair about its future.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

What’s done can’t be undone.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

Now I realize that from ’72 through to about ’76, I was the ultimate rock star. I couldn’t have been more rock star.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

To start with, I love New York… It’s a little bit of the whole world… In New York, the whole world comes to you.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

The former colonies, in Latin America in particular, have a better chance than ever before to overcome centuries of subjugation, violence and foreign intervention, which they have so far survived as dependencies with islands of luxury in a sea of misery.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.

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 world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

Is man one of God’s blunders? Or is God one of man’s blunders?

Beauty and folly are old companions.

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.

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.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

The land created me. I’m wild and lonesome. Even as I travel the cities, I’m more at home in the vacant lots.

We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.

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

One civilization after another has been wrecked upon the attempt to secure sufficient leadership from a single group or class.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

The Bible is full of warnings about false prophets and false messiahs. These satanically inspired people have appeared in almost every generation of history.

Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.

Even in high school I was very interested in history – why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

We are all alike, on the inside.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

The Spanish Empire eventually collapsed because of its expensive taste for warfare and conquest.

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

I was a little girl in World War II and I’m used to being freed by Americans.

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.

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

We travel often to Asia, Africa, Europe, where they were born.

If you’d have said Evangelical in 1957, most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. And then, they’d be against it.

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.

History is more or less bunk.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.