951 private quotes tagged history

“The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.”— Tom Osborne

“This is what I wanted. They tell me that London is the best field in history. I wanted to be part of that. Because everyone will be there it will be a wonderful challenge for me. You can see the best runners, how they look, how they run. For me to beat the best is what counts.”— Haile Gebrselassie

“The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly.”— Jean Piaget

“Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.”— Haruki Murakami

“When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.”— Eugene V. Debs

“Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.”— John Polkinghorne

“When I read Thirteen Days I was moved by it. It was just a great time for the world, in terms of looking back in history and seeing how we got ourselves into trouble and how we got ourselves out of trouble.”— Kevin Costner

“In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.”— John McCarthy

“I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.”— Daisaku Ikeda

“Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.”— Phyllis George

“Throughout out history, when people have looked for new ways to solve their problems, and to uphold the principles of this nation, many times they have turned to political parties. They have often turned to the Democratic Party.”— Barbara Jordan

“From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.”— Umberto Eco

“When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.”— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”— Abba Eban

“Everything was going my way. I was happily marching into the history books. Then it all just fell apart.”— George Michael

“It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.”— Joyce Carol Oates

“That's history. I say history because it happened in the past.”— Murray Walker

“The American people voted to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C., and the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”— Nancy Pelosi

“Strip malls are history.”— Jeff Bezos

“In fact history does not belong to us but we belong to it.”— Hans-Georg Gadamer

“War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.”— Jane Goodall

“History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums.”— Alan Greenspan

“If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.”— A. N. Wilson

“The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.”— Genevieve Gorder

“The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history and he failed to build a true international coalition.”— Nancy Pelosi