Privatization of assets that most of us consider public goods – like airports and highways – has a long, often-uncontroversial history. – Bethany McLean
Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There’s been an extraordinary advance. – Clifford Geertz
The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years. – Bernie Sanders
I don’t think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it’s more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on. – Alan Moore
If the history of the past fifty years teaches us anything, it is that peace does not follow disarmament – disarmament follows peace. – Bernard Baruch
In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer. – Anne Fortier
Throughout human history, in any great endeavour requiring the common effort of many nations and men and women everywhere, we have learned – it is only through seriousness of purpose and persistence that we ultimately carry the day. We might liken it to riding a bicycle. You stay upright and move forward so long as you keep up the momentum. – Ban Ki-moon
There’s a long history of private-company cooperation with the NSA that dates back to at least the 1970s. – Barton Gellman
What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos. – Anselm Kiefer
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. – Ambrose Bierce
The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: ‘Tobacco Road’, ‘Abie’s Irish Rose’ and our old friend ‘Spider-Man’, which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong. – Ben Brantley
Raphael Saadiq said to me, quite often, that Chuck D was his history teacher. And so he got a lot from the music, things that he wasn’t getting maybe in school. And I feel the same way with regards to Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder. – Ali Shaheed Muhammad
The greatest tragedy in mankind’s entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. – Arthur C. Clarke
I feel slightly uneasy at the way historians are consulted as if history is going to repeat itself. It never does. – Antony Beevor
One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since. – Bernice Johnson Reagon
There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment – and you start to decline. – Andy Grove
The worst pandemic in modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster. – Bill Gates
No one missed more basketball in the history of NBA than I did. I played 14 seasons, on the roster for 14 years, and I missed more than nine-and-a-half full seasons. – Bill Walton
I do think that this planet is a totally unjust planet. I mean throughout history – history paints a beautiful picture when it’s written by the victorious, but it’s a planet that belongs to the strong and the more able, and usually they are tyrants. So basically, I don’t see justice happening to the crushed and the weak. – Bassem Youssef
The uniqueness of the United States in human history is the United States is the first global power in human history which emerged far away from Africa or Asia, which is the main land of human history. – Ahmet Davutoglu
I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me. – Brian Clough
I had a place to go to university; I was going to study history. I was in New York doing ‘Arcadia,’ and I suddenly thought, ‘It feels a bit weird to go from a New York stage to Manchester University.’ It didn’t quite feel right. – Bel Powley
There’s no way to approach anything in an objective way. We’re completely subjective; our view of the world is completely controlled by who we are as human beings, as men or women, by our age, our history, our profession, by the state of the world. – Charlie Kaufman
War never accomplishes anything. It’s never going to look good in the history books. People are never going to look back and think, ‘He started a lot of wars; what a great leader he was!’ That’s not the way it works. God knows how many more of these things we’re going to need before it starts to sink in. – Alan Moore
‘What if?’ history is a tricky game, but there is no doubt that the senior planners of D-Day – including Eisenhower and the British general Bernard Montgomery – believed that the Double Cross operation had played a pivotal role in the victory. – Ben Macintyre
I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they’re writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way. – Alison Weir
Perhaps it is because I’m a writer trained in history that I’ve always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be. – Alice Dreger
The thing I’m particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It’s very exciting. – Andrea Barrett
You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism. – Alexander Haig
