I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants. – Matthew Pearl
I’m a Jew. I’m fascinated by our culture and our history, by what made us the people we are. It influences every breath I take. It informs and guides me. Without it, I’d just be a vacuum. – Mandy Patinkin
If Jeff Bezos and I had started Amazon.com in a poverty-stricken corner of Africa, there would have been no job creation because there would be no people to buy the stuff from Amazon.com. The difference here is the American middle class, which is by every measure the most extraordinary economic achievement in the history of the world. – Nick Hanauer
I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona. – Frances Mayes
I think young people don’t really know that much about the Civil Rights Movement and about the history of African Americans in this country. It’s not taught enough in school. – Don Lemon
That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That’s not possible. – Emir Kusturica
Kip Keino, Moses Tanui, Paul Tergat, they all come from my tribe. Some say it is the food we eat that makes us strong, the way we live. In the history of our people we wear no clothes and we are used to drinking the blood of animals. – Martin Lel
If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman. – Elon Musk
My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex. – Donald Tusk
You can’t deny RCA’s past and its history. I was also on Capitol Records, so I have that past history. – Garth Brooks
The Iraqi Free Press, which did not exist 18 months ago because there was no such thing as the Iraqi Free Press, broke a story about the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, which could potentially turn out to be the largest scandal in history. – Chris Chocola
The importance of the river cannot be overstated in the history of the country, or the development of the nation. – Maurice Hinchey
Until Eleanor Roosevelt, there was only one or two First Ladies in all of American history who made an impact, who people could even have recognized or identified. And it’s really only been since Jackie Kennedy that there’s been this idea that the family life of the president is such a central thing. – Gail Collins
My history teacher could make us feel like he was imparting rare gossip to us when he was talking about Maria Theresa and the Habsburgs. I just loved that sense of – the Western canon is here, and it’s gossipy and tawdry, and everyone is sort of goofy. – Mallory Ortberg
We’re living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories. – Doug Aitken
There’s a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it’s a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we’re, like, half a step on the stairwell – the timeline for us on this planet. – Peter Dinklage
Fashion is an expression of a time, of a place, of history. It’s putting things into context. – Nina Garcia
Fashion only seems to make sense if it’s rooted in some dimension of history or if it feels like a continuation of an idea. – Douglas Coupland
Standing here in a house of history, and acutely aware of my own imperfections, I pledge that if I am confirmed I will do all my powers permit to be a faithful servant of the Constitution and laws of this great country. – Neil Gorsuch
Too many people take New York for granted. The primary reason is that history is not taught. That’s outrageous in a city where the past is still visible. – Pete Hamill
The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present. – Ernest Dimnet
History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That’s very likely to happen to my books, and if I’m extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive. – Michel Faber
My college roommate gave me her copy of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and I read that probably five or six times – not because I think it’s the greatest thing ever written, though some people certainly think it is – but the world he creates is so vivid. So real that he designed its own languages, history and mythology. – Carol Berg
I believe that social change has almost reached critical mass. So many people have undergone personal transformation that their effect on society is having a geometric – not arithmetic – impact. This coalescence of energies brings about meeting, networking, and a sophistication in communications that is unprecedented in history. – Marilyn Ferguson
The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it’s less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women’s role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders. – Gail Collins
At the Oscars, if you didn’t vote for ’12 Years a Slave,’ you were a racist. You have to be very careful about what you say. I do have particular views and opinions that most of this town doesn’t share, but it’s not like I’m a fascist or a racist. There’s nothing like that in my history. – Gary Oldman
As he enters his final term, with the elegiac music playing out there in the distance, Barack Obama will use the history that he has come to embody and, perhaps, even to fulfill, as part of a larger project that never will be completed but only finished, over and over again. – Charlie Pierce
It’s a major part of world history that men are trying to kill each other. It’s just one slaughter after the other. We talk about it, but no one’s really listening. – Fred Ward