“It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
History is not just names and dates — it is the story of how we got here and a warning about where we might be headed. These quotes look at the past with curiosity, respect, and the awareness that those who ignore it tend to repeat it.
“I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it.”
“It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”
“You look at the greatest villains in human history, the fascists, the autocrats, they all wanted people to kneel before them because they don't love themselves enough.”
“If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.”
“If you listen to Giuliani, it's like nobody did anything to improve the city except him. I'm not part of the history. Bloomberg's not part of the history. It's like, he did it. He's the only one. That's why he's a little crazy.”
“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn't get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”
“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.”
“It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.”
“The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.”
“Things have never been more like the way they are today in history.”
“The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition.”
“I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science.”
“There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.”
“Permanent superiority has never been realized by any nation in history. After the rise comes the fall.”
“I'll watch any show on the History Channel.”
“I don't have a long family history of good cooks in my family.”