History quotes

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.

You think the world was shocked when Nixon resigned? Wait till I whup George Foreman’s behind.

Latin America has much richer resources. You’d expect it to be far more advanced than East Asia, but it had the disadvantage of being under imperialist wings.

For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Historically, privacy was almost implicit, because it was hard to find and gather information. But in the digital world, whether it’s digital cameras or satellites or just what you click on, we need to have more explicit rules – not just for governments but for private companies.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

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.

‚WASP‘ is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it’s inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

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

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.

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

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.

What is past is prologue.

For 500 years, since European explorers came, Latin American countries had been separated from one another. They had very limited relations. Integration is a prerequisite for independence.

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.

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.

Every President I think I’ve ever known, except Truman, has thought they didn’t quite get done what they wanted done. And toward the end of their Administrations, they were disappointed and wished they had done some things differently.

I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

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

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history – revisionist historians is what I like to call them.

Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent.

The facts tell us that no religious Faith releases – or ever has released at any moment in History – a higher degree of warmth, a more intense dynamism of unification than the Christianity of our own day – and the more Catholic it is, the truer my words.

I got no quarrel with them Vietcong.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

How wonderful it is to be an American. We have known the best of times and the worst of times.

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

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.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‚I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.‘

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

No boxer in the history of boxing has had Parkinson’s. There’s no injury in my brain that suggests that the illness came from boxing.

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.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

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

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Historically, the stuff of the universe goes on becoming concentrated into ever more organized forms of matter.

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.

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

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.‘

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

Assassination has never changed the history of the world.

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.

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.

When the PC was launched, people knew it was important.

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

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

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

The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years.

Nixon was no more a saint than he was a great president.

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left – which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study – are not likely to get much attention.

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

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.

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

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

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