If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.-Desmond Tutu
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.-Confucius
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.-George Santayana
History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.-John Dalberg-Acton
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.-Napoleon Bonaparte
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies. – Alexis de Tocqueville
There are no extraordinary men… just extraordinary circumstances that ordinary men are forced to deal with.-William Halsey
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’-Lyndon B. Johnson
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.-James Baldwin
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.-Martin Luther King, Jr.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.-Aldous Huxley
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.-George Santayana
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.-Woodrow Wilson
Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World.-Christopher Columbus
History is a vast early warning system.-Norman Cousins
I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. – Thomas Jefferson
History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.-Konrad Adenauer
The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.-Jacques Chirac
History is a set of lies agreed upon.-Napoleon Bonaparte
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.-Maya Angelou
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.-Peter L. Berger
Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.-Nelson Mandela
I came, I saw, I conquered.-Julius Caesar
Peace, plenty, and contentment reign throughout our borders, and our beloved country presents a sublime moral spectacle to the world.-James K. Polk
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.-Robert Kennedy
Time is my greatest enemy. – Evita Peron
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.-Henry Adams
Pearl Harbor caused our Nation to wholeheartedly commit to winning World War II, changing the course of our Nation’s history and the world’s future.-Joe Baca
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief… For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.-Wendell Berry
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.-Franklin D. Roosevelt
I did not come to NASA to make history.-Sally Ride
You must pursue this investigation of Watergate even if it leads to the president. I’m innocent. You’ve got to believe I’m innocent. If you don’t, take my job.-Richard M. Nixon
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.-Mahatma Gandhi
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.-John Adams
History never looks like history when you are living through it.-John W. Gardner
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. – Edward Gibbon
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.-Ambrose Bierce
With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.-Abraham Lincoln
I think the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest undertaking in American History. I think landing a man on the moon pales next to it.-Kathryn Lasky
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.-Winston Churchill
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.-Jessamyn West
History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.-Ted Koppel
Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.-Edward R. Murrow
A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.-Grover Cleveland
History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.-Martin Luther King, Jr.
The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. – A. Whitney Brown
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.-Louis D. Brandeis
It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.-Henry James
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.-Percy Bysshe Shelley
In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.-Richard M. Nixon
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation, usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.-Friedrich August von Hayek
The judicial system is the most expensive machine ever invented for finding out what happened and what to do about it.-Irving R. Kaufman
History develops, art stands still.-E. M. Forster
Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.-Joan of Arc
So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.-Milton Friedman
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. – H. G. Wells
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.-Samuel Butler
Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.-George Washington
In the Confederate Army, an officer was judged by stark courage alone, and this made it possible for the Confederacy to live four years.-Chesty Puller
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.-Abraham Lincoln