Do not be frivolous with the gift of a day. Right now it's all you have. Yesterday is history.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.
As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam.
The errors of former times are recorded for our instruction in order that we may avoid their repition.
The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
There are no great men, just great circumstances, and how they handle those circumstances will determine the outcome of history.
Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.
There was no more dangerous a time in a nation's life than the passing of a ruler when the succession was in doubt.
History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
The Declaration of Independence has been called, with some justice, the most revolutionary document in human history, in that it placed the individual person first in the political scheme of things and made the legitimacy of governments and ruling classes contingent on their success at preserving individual rights.
I counted them all out and I counted them all back.
When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.
If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.
The reason why you do history, and particularly why you do war, is that you want to make sure that in the next war, some lessons were learned. There's a saying: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. " Or Ecclesiastes: "What has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. " Human nature always superimposes itself - its strength and its frailty over the rush of chaos of ongoing events - and we can perceive patterns and themes and motifs.
Thanks to history books, I have realised that people over the years have been dying of war, and that enabled me to realise that there is nothing stupid like war.
How can we ever understand what we are and where we belong in the universe if we haven't experienced anything outside of our own nation, culture, or history?
The awful lesson of history is that we too often ignore people, just because they're foreigners or different from us.
"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history. " Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. . . . Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. . . . A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.