History shows that it’s not smart for states to pay more to get jobs; you just get into the race to the bottom. – Chris Gabrieli
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life. – Norman Cousins
I like dialogue in novels. I wanted to avoid laying history on with a trowel – appearing to be lecturing, as opposed to the characters lecturing their children or students. Dialogue can humanise the story and make it go down somewhat more smoothly. – Elliot Perlman
In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February. – Natasha Trethewey
I never feel lonely if I’ve got a book – they’re like old friends. Even if you’re not reading them over and over again, you know they are there. And they’re part of your history. They sort of tell a story about your journey through life. – Emilia Fox
I like powerful women, and I gravitate to any point in history when a female has significant power. I can spend hours researching any such amazing lady, from Ching Shih to Hatshepsut to Boudica to Zenobia. – Gail Carriger
I thought Obama was in a position to do some things. I thought 2008 was a turning point in history, with him and the Wall Street crash happening at the same time, but you just learn that those entrenched powers were really entrenched; those decayed institutions were really decayed. – George Packer
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. – George Santayana
To this wonderful page in our country’s history another more glorious still will be added, and the slave shall show at last to his free brothers a sharpened sword forged from the links of his fetters. – Giuseppe Garibaldi
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet’s language at that point in history, and so it’s even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. – Diane Wakoski
The freedom fighters in India’s long struggle for independence from British rule, or members of the African National Congress, were once classed as terrorists. History, as they say, is written by victors, but history also has many cunning corridors – how much time must elapse before all those tricky side-passages are revealed? – Neel Mukherjee
Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor. – Gary Weiss
What’s most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights. – Matthew Pearl
I think that both men, Bush and Blair, will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world. – George Galloway
There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves. – David Hume
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable. – Nadine Gordimer
The musical theater is a glorious and distinctly American innovation in the history of theater. – Diane Paulus
The countless number of influential figures in American history who are of Caribbean heritage indicates the need to set aside a designated time to celebrate their contribution to our country. – Eliot Engel
We are at a punctuation point in human history where the Industrial Age and institutions have finally come to their logical conclusion. They have essentially run out of gas. – Don Tapscott
The Postal Service is huge – employing more than a half million people – and its history is long and complicated. – Elizabeth Warren
Scientists habitually moan that the public doesn’t understand them. But they complain too much: public ignorance isn’t peculiar to science. It’s sad if some citizens can’t tell a proton from a protein. But it’s equally sad if they’re ignorant of their nation’s history, can’t speak a second language, or can’t find Venezuela or Syria on a map. – Martin Rees
The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn’t bug me. – Nick Hanauer