After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
—Cato the Elder
If a historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
—Pierre Bayle
Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable.
—Carl Sagan
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
—Winston Churchill
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
—Thomas Sowell
For a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.
—Frantz Fanon
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.
—G. K. Chesterton
If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
—Albert Camus
You are remembered for the rules you break.
—Douglas MacArthur
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ideas shape the course of history.
—John Maynard Keynes
Did you ever think about all of the nights you lived through and can’t remember? The ones that were so mundane your brain just didn’t bother to record them. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights come and go without being preserved by our memory. Does that ever freak you out? Like maybe your mind recorded all of the wrong nights?
—Matthew Quick in Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
—George Bernard Shaw
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
—William H. Borah