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 think the materialist conception of history is valid.

It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.

History, a distillation of rumour.

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

NATO’s brutal military alliance has become the most perfidious instrument of repression known in the history of humankind.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.

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

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

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

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

The Egyptians could run to Egypt, the Syrians into Syria. The only place we could run was into the sea, and before we did that we might as well fight.

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

History is written by the victors.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

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

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

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

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.

If I had a time machine, I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens.

Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.

‚Young Indiana Jones’ was one of the happiest times I ever had, so I love television.

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the U.S.A. won the medal of gold. The Greeks said, ‚You’re better than the Cassius of old.‘

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

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.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

Society therefore is as ancient as the world.

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

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

We’re still in a recession. We’re not gonna be out of it for a while, but we will get out.

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.

Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.

I’m very proud of the Rome episode of ‚No Reservations‘ because it violated all the conventional wisdom about making television. You’re never, ever supposed to do a food or travel show in black and white.

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

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.

I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall, perhaps by a young Berliner: ‚This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.‘ Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.

In the history of medicine, it is not always the great scientist or the learned doctor who goes forward to discover new fields, new avenues, new ideas.

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.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America.

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.

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

Once you get into this great stream of history, you can’t get out.

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

Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.

The U.S.S.R. had absolutely nothing to do with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

The atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

The Center for Disease Control started out as the malaria war control board based in Atlanta. Partly because the head of Coke had some people out to his plantation, and they got infected with malaria, and partly ‚cause all the military recruits were coming down and having a higher fatality rate from malaria while training than in the field.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.