History is the guess of old men, sometimes they get it wrong.

History will judge societies and governments — and their institutions — not by how big they are or how well they serve the rich and the powerful, but by how effectively they respond to the needs of the poor and the helpless.

The American flag doesn’t give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It’s when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of man that fought for this land. The purity of white...

The death knell for any enterprise is to glorify the past — no matter how good it was.

The Noblest form of Affection

Here we introduce the nation’s first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history’s first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union’s man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as “a third rate nonentity.” But the firm and its...

American houses…’ she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. ‘They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?

In other words, Hitler’s soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him. During the following six months during a series of irregular meetings and discussions with Hitler, Walter Stein was to witness a maturing soul development in this enigmatic...

We all inherit damage from the past. We spread it like a virus and don’t generally think about it.

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring about more meaning.

Now she could smell what the jaguar could smell, odors deeper and richer than anything she had experienced before, layers of smell she could read like Fray Tomás had read the words in her father’s book: the wet decay of leaves, the death fear of a mouse, the poisonous cloy of datura, water and mud...

History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.

Sing it again!” And the women would sing again: Measles knocks at the door. Smallpox asks, Who’s there? And Scarlet Fever replies: All three of us are here!

All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself

Yes, I believe in the displacement of this system of injustice by a just one; I believe in the end of starvation, exposure, and the crimes caused by them; I believe in the human soul regnant over all laws which man has made or will make; I believe there is no peace now, and there...

Most civilizations had more fiction than they did real history.

One day an intrepid sole will climb this mountain on its east side, reaching the summit and the passage that exist between the main peak and secondary peaks, by which he can descend to the west side of the mountain. It is at this site near Lake Brunner, between the main peak and an adjacent...

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

There was so much about our past that I still didn’t understand, and I wasn’t one to tell the future. I could only tell the way the world worked. History was a tangled thing, people were resilient, and the one constant law of the world was that it would heal.

I wish I did not know parts of the past; I wish they had never happened. But the past is the past, and someone must remember, and speak of it.

…history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.

We know we’re not a title-contending team right now, but in the history of teams winning titles they tend to take their lumps for a little while before they finally get there.

his-story” is often determined by those who survived to write it. In other words, history is written by the victors…Now, with the help of the Roman historian Tacitus, I shall tell you Queen Boudicca’s story, her-story……

In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.

each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Aligned Movement worked. They have no idea about the numerous wars...

…I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only...

There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always...

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.

History makes my mouth water – and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

I fancy you, Kitty Dawson,” a lone boy shouted.

They knew that to put God in the constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping or...

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it’s my ambition to create something compelling – something unputdownable and riveting – that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.

It seems to go in cycles. There have periods of history where it was considered bad form to flaunt your wealth but we are not in one of those now. Over the last 30 years, there has been a gradual weakening of the idea that you should not have a house too big because the...

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

May the scribes record it.

As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.

I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender. I...

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

Poor little girl. Poor little girl,” Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a...

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the ‘anticipation of Nature,’ that is, by the invention of...

The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by...

With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains of life too hard to bear, I have nothing to do; and, so far as it may be possible,...

Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

Mother, before God,” I say, my voice shaking with tears, “I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!