The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
- Mark Twain
I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.
- Jack Abramoff
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
- M H Abrams
Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?"
"The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?
- J R R Tolkien
History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
- J R R Tolkien
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- Douglas Adams
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?
- Douglas Adams
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
- Theodor Adorno
Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
- Harry S Truman
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
- Paulo Coelho
No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
- Paulo Coelho
In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.
- Jodi Picoult
The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.
- Horatio Alger
Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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
It was the best first kiss in the history of first kisses. It was as sweet as sugar. And it was warm, as warm as pie. The whole world opened up and I fell inside. I don't know where I was, but I didn't care. I didn't care because the only person who mattered was there with me.
- Sarah Addison Allen
When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.
- Margery Allingham
And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
- Nicole Krauss
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are those that lie just beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.
- Nicole Krauss
Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
- Sherwood Anderson
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
- Tadao Ando
The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?
- Hermann Hesse
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
- Thomas Jefferson
In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.
- Marie Arana
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
But then I remembered something Grandmere had once assured me of: No one has ever died of embarrassment-never, not once in the whole history of time.
- Meg Cabot
History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
- Aristotle
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
- Matthew Arnold
Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.
- Timothy Garton Ash
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail
- John Ashbery
Mitch---"
"All right, baby, I'll shut you up."
Then he did, his head slanting and his lips taking mine in a repeat performance of the open-mouthed, knock my socks off, rock my world, best kiss in the history of all time.
- Kristen Ashley
In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.
- Julian Assange
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
- Julian Assange
The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.
- Francis William Aston
Ever hear the expression "write what you know?" My version says "write what you want to know." If you want to know about the history of Spain, write about the history of Spain - fiction or nonfiction. If your fascinated by the old west, maybe your character lives there.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.
- Thomas Carlyle
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
- Thomas Carlyle
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
- W H Auden
You are not a victim. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You may have been challenged, hurt, betrayed, beaten, and discouraged, but nothing has defeated you. You are still here! You have been delayed but not denied. You are not a victim, you are a victor. You have a history of victory.
- Steve Maraboli
I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory.
- Steve Maraboli
Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
- J L Austin
March 11, 2004, now occupies a place in the history of infamy.
- Jose Maria Aznar
The history of our country is not the history of any other country in the world which is either practicing advanced democracy or struggling to lay the foundation for democracy.
- Ibrahim Babangida
Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn't agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?
- Richard Bach
And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.
- Richard Bach
After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.
- Michele Bachmann
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
- Walter Bagehot
Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.
- Ralph Bakshi
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
- James Baldwin
You think your pains and your heart-breaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
- James Baldwin
The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.
- James M Baldwin
In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time.
- James M Baldwin
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
- Muriel Barbery
my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened, like the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us
- Julian Barnes
That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
- Julian Barnes
My father is the harbinger of death and destruction. My grandmother the Great Destroyer. My mother is the goddess of the hunt. I think I'll be okay. (Kat)
Yeah, you do have the history of absolute terror and cruelty in your veins. (Sin)
Remember that if you ever come between me and my chocolate bar. (Kat)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
In every house, there was always one malcontent jealous prick out to destroy everyone else just for spite. The entire history of the earth was written in the blood of those betrayed by the very people they'd foolishly trusted. (Stryker)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
There's always one,
isn't there? Stryker asked rhetorically. In every house, there was always
one malcontent jealous prick out to destroy everyone else just for spite. The
entire history of the earth was written in the blood of those betrayed by the
very people they'd foolishly trusted.
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
Megeara wants to find it. (Arik)
And people in hell want ice water. The entire history of mankind is written by people wanting something they can't have. (Kat)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Chinese say that you should never, ever buy a used desk unless you know the history of it. They claim that if it belonged to a bad businessman, his karma will befall you. This one here belonged to President Kennedy. So what do you think that means? (Randy)
I don't know, but if I were you, I wouldn't ride through Dallas in a convertible in November. Bad feng shui. (Steele)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits.
The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two lane road slated, when finished to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies' Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nations past,...the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi.
- Nevada Barr
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
- Dave Barry
Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
- Dave Barry
The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
- Dave Barry
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
- Roland Barthes
We are people with all the hopes, dreams, passions, and faults of everyone else. Eighty percent of us are born into families with no history of dwarfism.
- Billy Barty
If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.
- Bernard Baruch
Each book has a secret history of ways and means.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.
- Cecil Beaton
With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
- Albert Camus
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
- Albert Camus
We have nothing but a history of our own invention to support this view. It suits us to believe it. It allows us to mistreat them, but convenience is not truth.
- Bernard Beckett
In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.
- Saul Bellow
In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.
- Brian Michael Bendis
Harrison Ford was pretty content as a carpenter who thought it would be nice to work on TV and ended up being the biggest film star in the history of cinema.
- Dirk Benedict
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
- Ruth Benedict
Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
- Ruth Benedict
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
The history of the last half century is accordingly in large measure a history of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.
- Haruki Murakami
He brings the greatest conflict into the history of mankind.
He will come soon to our world just like a thief in the night.
- Toba Beta
Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered.
But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it.
- Toba Beta
The reason why truth is so hard to be revealed
is because there are so many current practices
that would soon turn into a great history of bullshit.
- Toba Beta
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy...to wit--the wag of a dog's tail.
- Josh Billings
The source of wealth is from individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who have happened upon football as a means of serving some hidden agenda.
- Sepp Blatter
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
- Harold Bloom
It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
- Sidney Blumenthal
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
- Franz Boas
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..
- W E B Du Bois
I don't know the history of my sport. I'm not like those people who know everything.
- Usain Bolt
...he felt that his life was nothing more than a light that would blink once in the history of the universe and then be forgotten.
- Simon Van Booy
Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt.
- Simon Van Booy
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself....Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
- Ray Bradbury
The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.
- Benjamin C Bradlee
Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.
- Ann Brashares
{There} are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with 'explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.
- Madeleine L Engle
We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.
- William J Brennan Jr
I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.
- Beau Bridges
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
- Joseph Brodsky
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.
- John F Kennedy
We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.
- John F Kennedy
But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.
- Preston Brooks
I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.
- Dalai Lama
Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories...legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hands?
- Dan Brown
Today, as we look back on the history of our nation and take note of how far we have come as a people, we are reminded that we owe a great debt to those who fought valiantly for the freedoms that we easily take for granted.
- Sam Brownback
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
- Jackson Browne
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
It was critical to finding a way out. I had assumed young women knew the history of feminism and must have felt gratitude to the movement for the opportunities that the work we have done has afforded them.
- Betty Buckley
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.
- Robert Frost
the history of melancholia
includes all of us.
- Charles Bukowski
In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The history of England, who has always dealt most harshly with her vanquished foe in the few European wars in which she has taken part in modern times, gives us Germans an idea of the fate in store for us if defeated.
- Bernhard Von Bulow
A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.
- Saffron Burrows
The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.
- George W Bush
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
- Samuel Butler
The history of art is the history of revivals.
- Samuel Butler
In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
- Italo Calvino
The truth is the Republican leadership has created a credit card Congress that is recklessly selling out the future of America, our children and our grandchildren, and President Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible President in the history of America.
- Dennis Cardoza
It was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs. God, I was dying the longest, most tortuous, and arousing death in the history of the world.
- Cora Carmack
I am captivated more by dreams of the future then history of the past.
- Benjamin Franklin
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
- William James
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
- William James
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate..
- Anne Carson
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
- Jimmy Carter
The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.
- Giacomo Casanova
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
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
- Willa Cather
The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
- Richard Cecil
We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.
- Vinton Cerf
Well, I think that California has had a history of always spending more money than it takes in.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
- Michael Chabon
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.
- Michael Chabon
As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
- Michael Chabon
... my century..is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form....
- Whittaker Chambers
So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.
- James Chanos
Like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.
- Charles Chaplin
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.
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
During the fifth inning, something came to the edge of the woods and looked at her. Flies and noseeums made a cloud around its rudiment of a face. In the specious brilliance of its eyes was a complete history of nothing. It stood there for a long time.
- Stephen King
(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
- Bertrand Russell
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
- Ron Chernow
the mystic must be steadily told,All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,universal signs, instead of these village symbols,and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
- Stephen Jay Gould
The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.
- Shane Claiborne
It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
- Louis L Amour
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
- Louis L Amour
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
- John Henrik Clarke
I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
- John Cleese
The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!
- Dwight D Eisenhower
It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain.
- J M Coetzee
I think if you come from a history of persecution you have to develop a sense of humour.
- Sacha Baron Cohen
I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.
- Terry Pratchett
One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
- Robert A Heinlein
A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.
- Peter Cooper
For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.
- Nicolaus Copernicus
A traveller! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going fromtoward; it is the history of every one of us.
- Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
- Henry David Thoreau
Already liberals are trying to rewrite the history of the Cold War to remove Reagan from its core, to make him a doddering B-movie actor who happened to be standing there when the Soviet Union imploded. They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.
- Ann Coulter
Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines.
- Peter Coyote
Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.
- Michael Crichton
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
- Virginia Woolf
Sir, allusion has been made, in an early stage of this debate, to the history of the excitement which once pervaded a considerable part of the country, in reference to the transportation of the mails on the Lord's day.
- Caleb Cushing
My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.
- Georges Cuvier
I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.
- Santosh Kalwar
If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Just because it's the biggest secret in the history of the world doesn't make it any less true.
- Gina Damico
Even the bands I dig don't have a history of attaining mass consumption.
- Evan Dando
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
- Charles Darwin
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
- Richard Dawkins
In the history of women's tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.
- Lindsay Davenport
And it has some weight, I mean, the whole history of the gargoyles, that's some wonderful stuff.
- Keith David
Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
- Kurt Vonnegut
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
- Kurt Vonnegut
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
- Christopher Dawson
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.
- Don Delillo
We were kissing.
I thought: This is good.
I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.
Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed
- John Green
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
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.
- Sarah Dessen
If there is a single fact which anyone who seriously studies the history of Christianity cannot help but be struck by, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name this great international religion bears -- Jesus Christ. We know of him only what is told to us in the New Testament gospels, that is, practically nothing.
- Savitri Devi
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
- Jared Diamond
The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
- Jared Diamond
The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
- Ernest Dimnet
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
- Franz Kafka
The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.
- Benjamin Disraeli
Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
- Benjamin Disraeli
The history of our country is cruel. We have to face those issues or, should I say, we had to. Not anymore I hope, because we are going in the right direction, and we are ready to forgive, ready to move on.
- Novak Djokovic
Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
- Cory Doctorow
The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.
- Mary Douglas
When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.
- Milan Kundera
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
- Milan Kundera
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
- Ann Druyan
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing..
- Glen Duncan
The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear... (p. 92).
- Geoff Dyer
I'm a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.
- Gregg Easterbrook
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may need is the word I use to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.
- Roger Ebert
I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.
- Martin Luther King Jr
- Mark Twain
I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.
- Jack Abramoff
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
- M H Abrams
Mercy!" cried Gandalf. "If the giving of knowledge is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more should you like to know?"
"The names of all the stars, and of all living things, and the whole history of Middle-Earth and Over-heave and of the Sundering Seas," laughed Pippin. "Of course! What less?
- J R R Tolkien
History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.
- J R R Tolkien
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- Douglas Adams
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?
- Douglas Adams
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
- Theodor Adorno
Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
- Harry S Truman
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
- Paulo Coelho
No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.
- Paulo Coelho
In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.
- Jodi Picoult
The institution of chivalry forms one of the most remarkable features in the history of the Middle Ages.
- Horatio Alger
Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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
It was the best first kiss in the history of first kisses. It was as sweet as sugar. And it was warm, as warm as pie. The whole world opened up and I fell inside. I don't know where I was, but I didn't care. I didn't care because the only person who mattered was there with me.
- Sarah Addison Allen
When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.
- Margery Allingham
And it's like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only this was the opposite of disaster, how by accident she saved me with that thoughtless act of grace, and she never knew, and how that, too, is the part of the history of love.
- Nicole Krauss
Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are those that lie just beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.
- Nicole Krauss
Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
- Sherwood Anderson
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
- Tadao Ando
The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?
- Hermann Hesse
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.
- Thomas Jefferson
In the long history of male and female relations all the way back to the Garden, I can't think of one in which a woman's anger ever won over a man.
- Marie Arana
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
But then I remembered something Grandmere had once assured me of: No one has ever died of embarrassment-never, not once in the whole history of time.
- Meg Cabot
History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
- Aristotle
Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.
- Matthew Arnold
Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.
- Timothy Garton Ash
Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail
- John Ashbery
Mitch---"
"All right, baby, I'll shut you up."
Then he did, his head slanting and his lips taking mine in a repeat performance of the open-mouthed, knock my socks off, rock my world, best kiss in the history of all time.
- Kristen Ashley
In the history of Wikileaks, nobody has claimed that the material being put out is not authentic.
- Julian Assange
We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That is serious matter.
- Julian Assange
The cosmical importance of this conclusion is profound and the possibilities it opens for the future very remarkable, greater in fact than any suggested before by science in the whole history of the human race.
- Francis William Aston
Ever hear the expression "write what you know?" My version says "write what you want to know." If you want to know about the history of Spain, write about the history of Spain - fiction or nonfiction. If your fascinated by the old west, maybe your character lives there.
- Amelia Atwater Rhodes
History of the world is the biography of the great man. And I said: The great man always act like a thunder. He storms the skies, while others are waiting to be stormed.
- Thomas Carlyle
No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
- Thomas Carlyle
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that "faith" is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
- W H Auden
You are not a victim. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You may have been challenged, hurt, betrayed, beaten, and discouraged, but nothing has defeated you. You are still here! You have been delayed but not denied. You are not a victim, you are a victor. You have a history of victory.
- Steve Maraboli
I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory.
- Steve Maraboli
Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.
- J L Austin
March 11, 2004, now occupies a place in the history of infamy.
- Jose Maria Aznar
The history of our country is not the history of any other country in the world which is either practicing advanced democracy or struggling to lay the foundation for democracy.
- Ibrahim Babangida
Why? What is so wonderful about mass murder that nobody in the history of the world has ever fond any smarter solution to problems than killing everybody who doesn't agree? Is that the limit of human intelligence?
- Richard Bach
And like no other sculpture in the history of art, the dead engine and dead airframe come to life at the touch of a human hand, and join their life with the pilot's own.
- Richard Bach
After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country.
- Michele Bachmann
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
- Walter Bagehot
Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.
- Ralph Bakshi
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.
- James Baldwin
You think your pains and your heart-breaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
- James Baldwin
The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.
- James M Baldwin
In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time.
- James M Baldwin
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
- Muriel Barbery
my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened, like the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us
- Julian Barnes
That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
- Julian Barnes
My father is the harbinger of death and destruction. My grandmother the Great Destroyer. My mother is the goddess of the hunt. I think I'll be okay. (Kat)
Yeah, you do have the history of absolute terror and cruelty in your veins. (Sin)
Remember that if you ever come between me and my chocolate bar. (Kat)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
In every house, there was always one malcontent jealous prick out to destroy everyone else just for spite. The entire history of the earth was written in the blood of those betrayed by the very people they'd foolishly trusted. (Stryker)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
There's always one,
isn't there? Stryker asked rhetorically. In every house, there was always
one malcontent jealous prick out to destroy everyone else just for spite. The
entire history of the earth was written in the blood of those betrayed by the
very people they'd foolishly trusted.
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
Megeara wants to find it. (Arik)
And people in hell want ice water. The entire history of mankind is written by people wanting something they can't have. (Kat)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
The Chinese say that you should never, ever buy a used desk unless you know the history of it. They claim that if it belonged to a bad businessman, his karma will befall you. This one here belonged to President Kennedy. So what do you think that means? (Randy)
I don't know, but if I were you, I wouldn't ride through Dallas in a convertible in November. Bad feng shui. (Steele)
- Sherrilyn Kenyon
When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits.
The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two lane road slated, when finished to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies' Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nations past,...the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi.
- Nevada Barr
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
- Dave Barry
Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
- Dave Barry
The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
- Dave Barry
I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.
- Roland Barthes
We are people with all the hopes, dreams, passions, and faults of everyone else. Eighty percent of us are born into families with no history of dwarfism.
- Billy Barty
If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament - disarmament follows peace.
- Bernard Baruch
Each book has a secret history of ways and means.
- Henry Ward Beecher
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.
- Cecil Beaton
With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If only the significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be he history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
- Albert Camus
If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
- Albert Camus
We have nothing but a history of our own invention to support this view. It suits us to believe it. It allows us to mistreat them, but convenience is not truth.
- Bernard Beckett
In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.
- Saul Bellow
In the history of comics and movies and music too, it's always when things are at their bottomed-out, either creatively or financially, there's more chance-taking going on.
- Brian Michael Bendis
Harrison Ford was pretty content as a carpenter who thought it would be nice to work on TV and ended up being the biggest film star in the history of cinema.
- Dirk Benedict
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
- Ruth Benedict
Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
- Ruth Benedict
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
The history of the last half century is accordingly in large measure a history of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.
- Franklin D Roosevelt
They both loved piano music and were convinced that Beethoven's Sonata No. 32 was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music. And that Wilhelm Backhaus's unparalleled performance of the sonata for Decca set the interpretive standard.
- Haruki Murakami
He brings the greatest conflict into the history of mankind.
He will come soon to our world just like a thief in the night.
- Toba Beta
Prehistory of mankind is way too horrible to be remembered.
But if we choose to ignore it, then we'll be doomed to repeat it.
- Toba Beta
The reason why truth is so hard to be revealed
is because there are so many current practices
that would soon turn into a great history of bullshit.
- Toba Beta
In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money cannot buy...to wit--the wag of a dog's tail.
- Josh Billings
The source of wealth is from individuals with little or no history of interest in the game, who have happened upon football as a means of serving some hidden agenda.
- Sepp Blatter
I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.
- Harold Bloom
It's absolutely crucial for the Democrats to have a sense of their history, of who they are, in order to be able to project their values and stand up for them.
- Sidney Blumenthal
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered.
- Franz Boas
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American..
- W E B Du Bois
I don't know the history of my sport. I'm not like those people who know everything.
- Usain Bolt
...he felt that his life was nothing more than a light that would blink once in the history of the universe and then be forgotten.
- Simon Van Booy
Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt.
- Simon Van Booy
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself....Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about.
- Ray Bradbury
The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.
- Benjamin C Bradlee
Carmen hated the 'life is too short" rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.
- Ann Brashares
{There} are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with 'explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.
- Madeleine L Engle
We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time.
- William J Brennan Jr
I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.
- Beau Bridges
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
- Joseph Brodsky
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.
- John F Kennedy
We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.
- John F Kennedy
But, sir, they have written me down upon the history of the country as worthy of expulsion, and in no unkindness I must tell them that for all future time my self-respect requires that I shall pass them as strangers.
- Preston Brooks
I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.
- Dalai Lama
Mr. Langdon, I did not ask if you believe what man says about God. I asked if you believed in God. There is a difference. Holy scripture is stories...legends and history of man's quest to understand his own need for meaning. I am not asking you to pass judgment on literature. I am asking if you believe in God. When you lie out under the stars, do you sense the divine? Do you feel in your gut that you are staring up at the work of God's hands?
- Dan Brown
Today, as we look back on the history of our nation and take note of how far we have come as a people, we are reminded that we owe a great debt to those who fought valiantly for the freedoms that we easily take for granted.
- Sam Brownback
Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.
- Jackson Browne
We have actually experienced in recent months a dramatic demonstration of an unprecedented intelligence failure, perhaps the most significant intelligence failure in the history of the United States.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
It was critical to finding a way out. I had assumed young women knew the history of feminism and must have felt gratitude to the movement for the opportunities that the work we have done has afforded them.
- Betty Buckley
I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.
- Robert Frost
the history of melancholia
includes all of us.
- Charles Bukowski
In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.
- Chuck Palahniuk
The history of England, who has always dealt most harshly with her vanquished foe in the few European wars in which she has taken part in modern times, gives us Germans an idea of the fate in store for us if defeated.
- Bernhard Von Bulow
A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
I think politics can no longer be assigned to parliamentary activity and it probably never could be. But politics with a small p and the history of trade union movement really interests me.
- Saffron Burrows
The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.
- George W Bush
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
- Samuel Butler
The history of art is the history of revivals.
- Samuel Butler
In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
- Italo Calvino
The truth is the Republican leadership has created a credit card Congress that is recklessly selling out the future of America, our children and our grandchildren, and President Bush is the most fiscally irresponsible President in the history of America.
- Dennis Cardoza
It was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs. God, I was dying the longest, most tortuous, and arousing death in the history of the world.
- Cora Carmack
I am captivated more by dreams of the future then history of the past.
- Benjamin Franklin
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
- William James
Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.
- William James
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate..
- Anne Carson
The Carter Center has the only existing international taskforce on disease eradication. Which means a total elimination of a disease on the face of the Earth. In the history of the world, there's only been one disease eradicated: smallpox. The second disease, I think, is gonna be guinea worm.
- Jimmy Carter
The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke; it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.
- Giacomo Casanova
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
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
- Willa Cather
The history of all the great characters of the Bible is summed up in this one sentence: They acquainted themselves with God, and acquiesced His will in all things.
- Richard Cecil
We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.
- Vinton Cerf
Well, I think that California has had a history of always spending more money than it takes in.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world.
- Michael Chabon
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina's delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat -- was, literally, talked into life.
- Michael Chabon
As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness.
- Michael Chabon
... my century..is unique in the history of men for two reasons. It is the first century since life began when a decisive part of the most articulate section of mankind has not merely ceased to believe in God, but has deliberately rejected God. And it is the century in which this religious rejection has taken a specifically political form....
- Whittaker Chambers
So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.
- James Chanos
Like everyone else I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, all of which I am the sum total.
- Charles Chaplin
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.
- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
During the fifth inning, something came to the edge of the woods and looked at her. Flies and noseeums made a cloud around its rudiment of a face. In the specious brilliance of its eyes was a complete history of nothing. It stood there for a long time.
- Stephen King
(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
- Bertrand Russell
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
- Bertrand Russell
The history of Wall Street is inseparable from New York.
- Ron Chernow
the mystic must be steadily told,All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,universal signs, instead of these village symbols,and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show that all religious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.
- Stephen Jay Gould
The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.
- Shane Claiborne
It is often said that one has but one life to live, but that is nonsense. For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
- Louis L Amour
For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.
- Louis L Amour
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
- John Henrik Clarke
I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.
- John Cleese
The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!
- Dwight D Eisenhower
It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain.
- J M Coetzee
I think if you come from a history of persecution you have to develop a sense of humour.
- Sacha Baron Cohen
I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.
- Terry Pratchett
One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.
- Robert A Heinlein
A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts are the result of sudden impulse and accident than of that reason of which we so much boast.
- Peter Cooper
For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study.
- Nicolaus Copernicus
A traveller! I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going fromtoward; it is the history of every one of us.
- Henry David Thoreau
It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.
- Henry David Thoreau
Already liberals are trying to rewrite the history of the Cold War to remove Reagan from its core, to make him a doddering B-movie actor who happened to be standing there when the Soviet Union imploded. They have the media, the universities, the textbooks. We have ourselves. We are the witnesses.
- Ann Coulter
Kennedy invited us into the White House-the first time in the history of the White House picketers had been invited inside. This made front page headlines.
- Peter Coyote
Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.
- Michael Crichton
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
- Virginia Woolf
Sir, allusion has been made, in an early stage of this debate, to the history of the excitement which once pervaded a considerable part of the country, in reference to the transportation of the mails on the Lord's day.
- Caleb Cushing
My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.
- Georges Cuvier
I have more wisdom than any books ever written in history of times, any scripture ever written which you rhyme but this is not my purpose.
- Santosh Kalwar
If the history of the 20th Century proved anything, it proved that however bad things were, human ingenuity could usually find a way to make them worse.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Just because it's the biggest secret in the history of the world doesn't make it any less true.
- Gina Damico
Even the bands I dig don't have a history of attaining mass consumption.
- Evan Dando
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
- Charles Darwin
But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.
- Richard Dawkins
In the history of women's tennis the great players have come back from long absences with no problems.
- Lindsay Davenport
And it has some weight, I mean, the whole history of the gargoyles, that's some wonderful stuff.
- Keith David
Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
- Kurt Vonnegut
If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
- Kurt Vonnegut
I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples.
- Christopher Dawson
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself.
- Don Delillo
We were kissing.
I thought: This is good.
I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.
Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed
- John Green
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
There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past. I wasn't sure I had it in me to keep looking back.
- Sarah Dessen
If there is a single fact which anyone who seriously studies the history of Christianity cannot help but be struck by, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name this great international religion bears -- Jesus Christ. We know of him only what is told to us in the New Testament gospels, that is, practically nothing.
- Savitri Devi
The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world's most troubled areas.
- Jared Diamond
The southward advance of native African farmers with Central African crops halted in Natal, beyond which Central African crops couldn't grow - with enormous consequences for the recent history of South Africa.
- Jared Diamond
The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.
- Ernest Dimnet
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
- Franz Kafka
The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.
- Benjamin Disraeli
Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
- Benjamin Disraeli
The history of our country is cruel. We have to face those issues or, should I say, we had to. Not anymore I hope, because we are going in the right direction, and we are ready to forgive, ready to move on.
- Novak Djokovic
Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.
- Cory Doctorow
The history of the Church of Rome is a constant leakage of members into such breakaway cults, which go on splitting.
- Mary Douglas
When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.
- Milan Kundera
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
- Milan Kundera
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
- Ann Druyan
Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing..
- Glen Duncan
The history of sex is the history of glimpses: first ankles, then cleavage, then knees. More recently, tattoos, navel rings, tongue studs, underwear... (p. 92).
- Geoff Dyer
I'm a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.
- Gregg Easterbrook
My books are a subject of much discussion. They pour from shelves onto tables, chairs and the floor, and Chaz observes that I haven't read many of them and I never will. You just never know. One day I may need is the word I use to read Finnegans Wake, the Icelandic sagas, Churchill's history of the Second World War, the complete Tintin in French, 47 novels by Simenon, and By Love Possessed.
- Roger Ebert
I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.
- Martin Luther King Jr
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