It's the way our founding fathers would have wanted it, if they had founded corporations instead of just a country.

Agnostics are just atheists without balls.

If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn't have declared their independence from it.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

The peace movement here is the biggest thing in human history.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

It's a historical phenomenon that in 250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous nation of the world and the leader of the world. It is indeed an achievement, a tribute to the talent of the American nation, the American people and an optimal political and economic system.

This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt.

If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.

History is not was, it is.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing," he said. "All people are good except those who are idle.

By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;

Historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself sharply from bourgeois habits of thought. Its founding concept is not progress but actualization.

A Persian army being then subject to great inconveniences, for their horses are tied and generally shackled to prevent them from running away, and if an alarm happens, a Persian has the housing to fix, his horse to bridle, and his corslet to put on before he can mount.

“It is impossible to read the history of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. If they exhibit occasional calms, these only serve as short-lived contrast to the furious storms that are to succeed. If now and then intervals of felicity open to view, we behold them with a mixture of regret, arising from the reflection that the pleasing scenes before us are soon to be overwhelmed by the tempestuous waves of sedition and party rage.”

“Every person, according to an ancient legend, is born into the world with two bags suspended from their neck: all bags in front full of their neighbors’ faults, and a large bag behind filled with his own faults. Hence it is that people are quick to see the faults of others, and yet are often blind to their own failings.”

“The ancient Egyptians had a superstitious antipathy to the sea; a superstition nearly of the same kind prevails among the Indians; and the Chinese have never excelled in foreign commerce.”

“We can no longer rely on tradition, on consensus, on cultural habit, on unanimity of belief to give us our values. These agreed-upon traditions are all gone. Of course, we never should have rested on traditionas its failures must have proven to everyone by now-it never was a firm foundation. It was destroyed too easily by truth, by honesty, by the facts, by science, by simple, pragmatic, historical failure.”

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Women with pasts interest men because they hope history will repeat itself.