history
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘history’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“I went to Ohio University studying arts and history, and playing football. But I was only interested in girls, my pals and sports. I only did the minimum for school.” -Ed O’Neill
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“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” -Angela Carter
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“The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.” -Tom Osborne
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“I don’t really think of things in terms of legacy or where I stand in the history of Nintendo or anything like that.” -Shigeru Miyamoto
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“For most of our history, no one dared to tell Americans, ‘you don’t build that.’” -Rand Paul
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“I had a go at changing history – maybe not all by myself – I fought at the battle of Normandy, I slogged through the Ardennes, and I celebrated the liberation of Paris on the streets with beautiful French girls throwing flowers at me. I said good-bye to my first true love and discovered what…
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“Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.” -Haruki Murakami
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“The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.” -Jean Piaget
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“I’m a good son, a good father, a good husband – I’ve been married to the same woman for 30 years. I’m a good friend. I finished college, I have my education, I donate money anonymously. So when people criticize the kind of characters that I play on screen, I go, ‘You know, that’s part…
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“I want to go down in history.” -Haile Gebrselassie
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“You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.” -Alexander Haig
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“I’ve never been nostalgic, personally or politically – if the past was so great, how come it’s history?” -Julie Burchill
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“A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life.” -Norman Cousins
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“I’m quite good at taking in information so I voraciously inhale Wikipedia – which may have some things wrong in it, but I think is generally more information than we had before. Last tour we didn’t have Wikipedia. And then Discovery Channel and History Channel. I can take it in and retain what I think…
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“Debate and divergence of views can only enrich our history and culture.” -Ibrahim Babangida
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“Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.” -Gene Tierney
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“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.” -Jose Ortega y Gasset
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“What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later.” -Jonathan Sacks
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“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.” -Thomas Mann
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“We are not being arrogant or complacent when we are said that our country, as a united nation, has never in its entire history, enjoyed such a confluence of encouraging possibilities.” -Thabo Mbeki
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“The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.” -Edwin Powell Hubble
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“I think that both men, Bush and Blair, will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world.” -George Galloway
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“Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.” -Lion Feuchtwanger
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“In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.” -Wallace Shawn
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“I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn’t have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling… I’m the most sampled artist in history.” -Rick James
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“I don’t seem to be able to learn from experience or anything useful. History doesn’t help me. Precedents don’t inform my experience.” -Bill Nighy
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“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” -Abba Eban
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“The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.” -Erica Jong
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“I’m not giving up my history and what I’ve done in my music because I love it and I’m very proud of it. I just want to open it up for more people.” -LL Cool J
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“Some might think that George W. Bush had his shortcomings, but let me tell you something – history’s going to be kind to George W. Bush.” -J. C. Watts
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“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they’re whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they’ve got. I can’t possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.” -David Cronenberg
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“I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.” -Hugh Laurie
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“I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.” -Jeremy Rifkin
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“So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history.” -Murray Gell-Mann
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“History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose.” -John le Carre
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“India is a curious place that still preserves the past, religions, and its history. No matter how modern India becomes, it is still very much an old country.” -Anita Desai
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“For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.” -Nicolaus Copernicus
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“You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was.” -Leopold Von Ranke
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“Christians should be ready for a change because Jesus was the greatest changer in history.” -Ralph Abernathy
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“History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.” -Eldridge Cleaver
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“He could have made it right with the book. But he hasn’t. He is a revisionist of history. He has lied.” -Monica Lewinsky
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“History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.” -Rosa Luxemburg
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“The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune.” -Bruce Springsteen
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“But I think it’s more that when you’re young, you’re invincible, you’re immortal – or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you’re inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It’s fixed. You can’t change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.” -Damien…
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“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” -Henry James
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“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.” -Mao Zedong
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“The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making…
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“There is a widespread difficulty in the Muslim world, which has to do with how the people are taught about examining their own history. A whole range of stuff has been placed off limits.” -Salman Rushdie
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“To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter.’” -V. S. Naipaul
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“I don’t see women and think of them as competition or with judgment. Women really move me. I feel connected to all kinds of women. I am angry because I think we’ve been mistreated throughout history in different countries, including America. I admire women.” -Salma Hayek
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“Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.” -Susan Sontag
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“There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.” -James Lovelock
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“We know from our own history that democratic institutions take decades to mature, and we know from past conflicts that freedom is not free.” -Jim DeMint
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“A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man’s pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.” -Russell Baker
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“For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.” -Bill Moyers
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“I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.” -Twyla Tharp
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“This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.” -John Perkins
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“Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.” -Thomas Francis Meagher
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“Throughout history no one has suffered more than God. He has suffered because his own children fell away from him. Ever since the Fall, God has been working tirelessly for the restoration of mankind. People do not know this brokenhearted aspect of God.” -Sun Myung Moon
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“A year is an eternity in politics – though less than a moment in history.” -Eliot Spitzer
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“I have written too much history to have faith in it and if anyone thinks I’m wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.” -Henry Adams
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“Cause and effect, the riddle of all history, is a particular devil in financial history and never more so than today, where entire classes of security are collapsing not on public exchanges and stock-tickers but because there are no markets to establish prices this side of nothing.” -James Buchan
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“I just think it would be unrealistic to suggest we’re going to eliminate every last domestic insurgent in Afghanistan. Certainly, the history of the country would indicate that’s not a very realistic objective, and I think we have to have realistic objectives.” -Stephen Harper
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“Violence is a part of America. I don’t want to single out rap music. Let’s be honest. America’s the most violent country in the history of the world, that’s just the way it is. We’re all affected by it.” -Spike Lee
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“The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history.” -Carl T. Rowan
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“If America wants to retain its position as a global power, its president must listen to the people and show strong leadership at this turning point in human history.” -David Suzuki
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“It’s a huge challenge, a huge responsibility. Bond is a huge iconic figure in movie history. These opportunities don’t come along very often so I thought, ‘Why not?’” -Daniel Craig
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“History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.” -George H. W. Bush
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“Permanent superiority has never been realized by any nation in history. After the rise comes the fall.” -Paul Harris
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“OUR history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us.” -James Nasmyth
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“The history of Christianity, therefore, must be of concern to all who are interested in the record of man and particularly to all who seek to understand the contemporary human scene.” -Kenneth Scott Latourette
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“Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.” -Ken Kesey
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“In retrospect, the Millennium marked only a moment in time. It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.” -Tony Blair
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“The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.” -Jon Meacham
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“Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things.” -Jonathan Safran Foer
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“There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment – and you start to decline.” -Andy Grove
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“We also have to make sure our children know the history of women. Tell them the rotten truth: It wasn’t always possible for women to become doctors or managers or insurance people. Let them be armed with a true picture of the way we want it to be.” -Anne Roiphe
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“Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.” -Dick Gregory
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“I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American.” -George McGovern
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“Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.” -Robert Anton Wilson
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“Culinary tradition is not always based on fact. Sometimes it’s based on history, on habits that come out of a time when kitchens were fueled by charcoal.” -Alton Brown
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“Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and will find themselves on the wrong side of history.” -William Hague
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“Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation.” -Luis Gutierrez
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“I don’t think that there’s been one example in history where somebody has openly talked about their personal life and it’s done them any good.” -Rashida Jones
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“For all of higher civilization’s recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family.” -Dennis Prager
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“I was determined to achieve the total freedom that our history lessons taught us we were entitled to, no matter what the sacrifice.” -Rosabeth Moss Kanter
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“After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon’s tapes.” -Bob Woodward
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“What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.” -Arthur Erickson
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“I’m trying to make a case for those people who don’t have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history.” -Billy Bragg
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“For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.” -Michael Pollan
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“Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.” -Martin Heidegger
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“He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.” -Lech Walesa
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“The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.” -Horatio Alger
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“It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.” -Rebecca West
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“When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.” -John Malkovich
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“Texas was such a welcoming place, and with its unbelievable history and tradition, it’s extra special to be a part of that.” -Ricky Williams
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“I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.” -Joe Biden
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“I’m inspired by history, different periods.” -Adam Lambert
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“If I were beginning my career today, I don’t think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically, I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television, and I think if…
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“Young women today often have very little appreciation for the real battles that took place to get women where they are today in this country. I don’t know how much history young women today know about those battles.” -Sandra Day O’Connor
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“You’re going to relegate my history to a month.” -Morgan Freeman
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“Part of the problem is voters know relatively little about Romney. And some of what they know about him complicates his task: Romney has a history of flip-flopping on issues, he’s extraordinarily wealthy, and he can be tone-deaf about what moves voters. He just doesn’t seem comfortable in his skin.” -Ron Fournier
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“Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.” -Thurgood Marshall
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“We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people – history has made us all South Africans.” -Mangosuthu Buthelezi
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“I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.” -Tony Bennett
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“Yes, they broke the law, but we can’t deport them. Let’s get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it – they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.” -Michael Bloomberg
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“I’m really interested in modern history, but to fulfill a History degree at Brown you have to do modern and pre-modern.” -Emma Watson
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“The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.” -Albert J. Nock
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“The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable.” -Robert Menzies
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“But look, I was born in 1956, the peak year for births in US history. I think I’m very representative of many of the thought processes my generation have been through and, by and large, people of my age have had their imprint planted on the consciousness of western society for a long time.” -Tom…
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“In history people dressed much better than we do today.” -Vivienne Westwood
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“It’s in the history books, the Holocaust. It’s just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.” -Gene Simmons
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“My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.” -Jeanne Moreau
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“Life moves fast. As much as you can learn from your history, you have to move forward.” -Eddie Vedder
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“History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.” -Gerald R. Ford
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“World history is a court of judgment.” -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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“There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.” -Georgios A. Papandreou
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“At times, we were forced to go through a history of dependence, unable to determine our own destiny. But today, we are at the threshold of a new turning point.” -Roh Moo-hyun
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“September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.” -Doris Lessing
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“I do have to say that I think that President Obama is the greatest President in the history of all of our Presidents, and that he can do no wrong in my book. So how’s that for prejudice on the Democratic side?” -Denis Leary
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“I do consider myself part of black history.” -Mary J. Blige
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“Having bought furniture for my own house, and bought furniture for our house in Washington, a furniture store seemed like a good idea, and it also played into my personal history.” -Elizabeth Edwards
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“Man’s naked form belongs to no particular moment in history it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.” -Auguste Rodin
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“Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world’s heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.” -Edwin Hubbel Chapin
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“I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.” -David Rockefeller
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“The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.” -Paul Valery
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“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.” -Chinua Achebe
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“History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” -Edward Gibbon
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“In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?” -Charles de Gaulle
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“The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.” -Muhammad Iqbal
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“A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.” -John Maynard Keynes
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“It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.” -Hannah Arendt
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“Obama has seen to the passage of the most radical legislation in recent American history and so-called ‘progressives’ should be thanking him for it – even as many of the rest of us rear in horror from its implications.” -John Podhoretz
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“The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man’s being, unfolding itself in thought.” -Karl Jaspers
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“History shows that when the church accommodates culture, it weakens it.” -Rick Warren
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“There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.” -Coretta Scott King
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“Through all of history mankind has ingested psychedelic substances. Those substances exist to put you in touch with spirits beyond yourself, with the creator, with the creative impulse of the planet.” -Ray Manzarek
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“I am fascinated by history and particularly the Victorian era.” -Annie Lennox
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“Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.” -Nicolas Chamfort
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“I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians.” -Elton John
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“The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.” -David Cameron
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“Barack Obama is the most famous living person in the history of the world.” -Dee Dee Myers
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“Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“My sense of the family history is somewhat sketchy, because my mother kept a great deal to herself.” -Julie Andrews
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“Legend remains victorious in spite of history.” -Sarah Bernhardt
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“I was reading a book… ‘the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down.” -Tim Vine
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“Then I despair… I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.” -Andre Malraux
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“Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay.” -Alice Roosevelt Longworth
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“What has made America amazing has been the fact that throughout our history, throughout the more than 200 years of our history, there have been men and women of courage who stood up and decided it was more important to look out for the future of their children and their grandchildren than their own political…
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“The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.” -Ralph Nader
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“We can’t understand when we’re pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time – like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children.” -Anne Lamott
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“History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.” -Johan Huizinga
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“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.” -Stefan Zweig
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“When you say things like, ‘We have to wipe out the Taliban,’ what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.” -Arundhati Roy
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“Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.” -Dag Hammarskjold
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“To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.” -Hermann Hesse
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“Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan’s bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.” -Camille Paglia
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“No country in the history of the world has ever contributed more to humankind and accomplished more for its people in so brief a period of time as Israel has done since its relatively recent rebirth in 1948.” -Alan Dershowitz
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“I’m a person that just likes to speak the truth, and I don’t understand why in America it’s such a big deal that we won’t read the Koran and we won’t look at history.” -Pat Robertson
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“But when one believes that you’ve been appointed by God for a particular mission in history, you have to be very careful about that, how you speak about that. Where is the self-reflection in that? Where is the humility in that?” -Jim Wallis
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“Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather.” -Ilka Chase
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“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.” -Octavio Paz
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“My argument is that War makes rattling good history but Peace is poor reading.” -Thomas Hardy
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“I thought that all of the sacrifices and blessings of the whole history of mankind have devolved upon me. Thank you, God.” -Ben Stein
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“To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.” -Daniel Libeskind
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“If Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, and He did die on a cross at a point of time in history, then, for all history past and all history future it is relevant because that is the very focal point for forgiveness and redemption.” -Josh McDowell
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“I think people in general have neglected to learn about history.” -Maynard James Keenan
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“Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.” -Will Durant
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“If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We’re a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.” -Madeleine Albright
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“You don’t change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.” -Jawaharlal Nehru
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“I think sometimes I guess you see records, say you want to get there and use that as motivation. In a way, it’s kind of cool if there is a possibility to rewrite history and be up there with the greats of Olympic history.” -Michael Phelps
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