There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
—Abba Eban
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
—Alfred Whitney Griswold
The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.
—Solomon Short
History fades into fable, fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy, the inscription molders from the tablet, the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids—what are they but heaps of sand, and their epitaphs but characters written in the dust?
—Washington Irving
It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
—Bill Vaughan
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
—Bertrand Russell
It's not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.
—Edwin Land
Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.
—Theodore Roosevelt
America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
—Arnold Toynbee
I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.
—Bob Dylan
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
—George Bernard Shaw
A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
—William Ralph Inge
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
—Will Durant