Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Every bullet fired from the barrel of a police pistol was my bullet. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.
We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.
All necessary measures shall be taken to encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale.
Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.
Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.
The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.
History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.
We must ever mandate the principle that the people of this continent alone have the right to decide their own destiny.
The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.
The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.
K is for "Kenghis Khan"; He was a very nice person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.
The world order which we seek is the co-operation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. They're monumental. They're straight out of Page 52 in your school history book.
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.
The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.
This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.
History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.
What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.
It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.
Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions. The search engine is one of the greatest inventions in human history.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses.
I can see clearly now... that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate.
History teaches the young the virtues of freedom. By apprising them of the past it will enable them to judge the future.
Those Victorians: endlessly fascinating, broad in their learning, heroic in their achievements, in parts completely mad.
Never limit yourself because of others' limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.
History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
I arrived in Hollywood without having my nose fixed, my teeth capped, or my name changed. That is very gratifying to me.
In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.
Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.
When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
For the first time in human history, there seems to be a radical increase in the proportion reaching principled morality.
A work should convey its entire meaning by itself, imposing it on the spectator even before he knows what the subject is.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
History is either a moral argument with lessons for the here-and-now, or it is merely an accumulation of pointless facts.
To those of you who seek lost objects of history, I wish you the best of luck. They're out there, and they're whispering.
We boast our emancipation from many superstitions; but if we have broken any idols, it is through a transfer of idolatry.
The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.
Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.
In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.