Most of us would benefit greatly from recognizing and accepting the difference between our history and our destiny.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally – oh, very rarely! – the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses...

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of...

The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.

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,...

Kebanyakan buku tentang penderitaan keluarga orang yang dianggap terlibat G-30-S tahun 1965 ditulis dengan kemarahan. Buku “Berpijak di Dunia Retak: Catatan Keluarga Penyintas Tragedi 1965” ini malah mengalir dengan nuansa ketabahan dan keuletan menempuh ujian...

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.

When we can’t see ourselves in our history, we begin to think that we are disconnected and suffering alone. Historical ignorance always precedes cultural imbalances and individual despair.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of...

Living your life is a task so difficult it has never been attempted before.

Sometimes – history needs a push.

Black seamen – or “Black Jacks” as African sailors were known – enjoyed a refreshing world of liberty and equality. Even if they were generally regulated to jobs such as cooks, servants, and muscians and...

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win...

That Detroit ultimately concentrated on automobiles could be traced to one genius, Henry Ford…. But that the necessary human energy for this development existed in Detroit could be proven through its early history…. I told...

…history is a selection process – it chooses moments and events, and even people – it hands them a situation that they shouldn’t be able to overcome, and it’s in those moments, in that fight,...

Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we...

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation...

You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well contentBy any jest of mine. These men are worthYour tears:You are not worth their merriment.

He(Prophet Muhammad) was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue;...

I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.

Anthony imagined a time before all that – a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside.

The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately...

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once...

‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn’t greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize...

What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own AfricanAmerican culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or...

It’s a shame for a woman’s history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and...

Let us search the old highways.

History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now...

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.

The young are often savvy in the cultural world but not so much the intellectual; the old the intellectual but not so much the cultural. But I tell you those who do the most damage...

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

This moment is history.

Study the past if you would define the future.

History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.

Many in America, as one social historian wrote, ‘believed implicitly that New York’s social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady...

Amerika bersikap toleran pada negara Asia yang terbelakang karena dua alasan. Pertama, kami merupakan pasar yang bagus. Kami membayar kembali dengan memberi bunga. Dan yang kedua, mereka takut kami menjadi komunis. Ia mencoba membeli kesetiaan...

Kami terus melangkah, tetapi perjalanan waktu tidak bisa dihentikan.

Dalam hal terentu kecintaan rakyat ini menimbulkan kesulitan, sama halnya dengan kebencian dari musuh.

Kebesaran adalah kemampuan untuk membuat massa melakukan gerakan – Hitler

Kita harus melepaskan diri dari pengaruh-pengaruh yang membelenggu kita pada masa lalu yang memalukan, seperti para pelayan, jongos, dan orang desa yang tidak punya nama dan tidak punya wajah.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met...

Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.

The Lutz heck that emerges from his writings and actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that...

Through a history book, I can time travel. Especially a history book from the future.

…, imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of...

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.