Famous Quotes

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Beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry. One such attempt in ten thousand may succeed. These are fearful odds.

Benjamin Disraeli

September 11th was a moment when America had the sympathy of the world.

Tom Ford

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Samuel Butler

Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

Anita Baker

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.

Queen Elizabeth II

A world without nuclear weapons would be less stable and more dangerous for all of us.

Margaret Thatcher

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Winston Churchill

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

James Baldwin

Something as curious as the monarchy won't survive unless you take account of people's attitudes. After all, if people don't want it, they won't have it.

Prince Charles

History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

Ambrose Bierce

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

Peter L. Berger

The nation was awakened by that deafening shot.

Corazon Aquino

The lesson of history is that you do not get a sustained economic recovery as long as the financial system is in crisis.

Ben Bernanke

The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.

Irving R. Kaufman

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

Abraham Lincoln

I think the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest undertaking in American History. I think landing a man on the moon pales next to it.

Kathryn Lasky

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

Aldous Huxley

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Black Elk

These fallen heroes represent the character of a nation who has a long history of patriotism and honor - and a nation who has fought many battles to keep our country free from threats of terror.

Michael N. Castle

History develops, art stands still.

E. M. Forster

Time is my greatest enemy.

Evita Peron

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Henry Adams

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

Norman Cousins

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Daniel Libeskind

If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.

David Horowitz

They were afraid, never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.

G. Gordon Liddy

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.

Lawrence Summers

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H. G. Wells

The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual - for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.

M. Scott Peck

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.

Alfred de Vigny

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

M. H. Abrams

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

Daniel Libeskind

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

John W. Gardner

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds.

Abraham Lincoln

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind.

Neil Armstrong

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

Napoleon Bonaparte

Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.

George Washington

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world.

Colin Powell

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

Jacques Chirac

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

Jessamyn West

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.

Christopher Columbus

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Thomas Jefferson

France, and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing though is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.

Johnny Depp

There are no extraordinary men... just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.

William Halsey

We, therefore, here in Britain stand shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in this hour of tragedy, and we, like them, will not rest until this evil is driven from our world.

Tony Blair

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'

Lyndon B. Johnson

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

Konrad Adenauer

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Edward Gibbon

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Henry James

The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.

Byron White

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Jacques Yves Cousteau

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Tacitus

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Lawrence Durrell

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

Napoleon Bonaparte

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Globalization has created this interlocking fragility. At no time in the history of the universe has the cancellation of a Christmas order in New York meant layoffs in China.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

Mahatma Gandhi

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Kennedy

They died hard, those savage men - like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

Douglas MacArthur

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

Nelson Mandela

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws.

Vladimir Lenin

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Milton Friedman

In the Confederate Army, an officer was judged by stark courage alone, and this made it possible for the Confederacy to live four years.

Chesty Puller

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Confucius

Peace, plenty, and contentment reign throughout our borders, and our beloved country presents a sublime moral spectacle to the world.

James K. Polk

What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown - watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?

Jackie Kennedy

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Jean Chretien

We peruse one ideal, that of bringing people together in peace, irrespective of race, religion and political convictions, for the benefit of mankind.

Juan Antonio Samaranch

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

A. Whitney Brown

Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle.

George S. Patton

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.

Friedrich August von Hayek

I came, I saw, I conquered.

Julius Caesar

Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation's history and the world's future.

Joe Baca

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

Maya Angelou

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

Thomas Jefferson

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Desmond Tutu

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

Joan of Arc

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.

Louis D. Brandeis

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

Marge Piercy

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

Woodrow Wilson

I did not come to NASA to make history.

Sally Ride

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Timothy Leary

I am thankful the most important key in history was invented. It's not the key to your house, your car, your boat, your safety deposit box, your bike lock or your private community. It's the key to order, sanity, and peace of mind. The key is 'Delete.'

Elayne Boosler

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

H. L. Mencken

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

George W. Bush

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

Ted Koppel

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

John F. Kennedy

Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows.

Dante Alighieri

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

Edward R. Murrow

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

John Adams

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

History is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

John Dalberg-Acton

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

William James