Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
Could I have but a line a century hence crediting a contribution to the advance of peace, I would yield every honor which has been accorded by war.
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it's a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.
[History is] petrified imagination.
For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.
There never was a time in our history when ignorance of current affairs could be so dangerous.
History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.
History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking.
History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
What you do is your history. What you set in motion is your legacy.
At the dawn of the 21st century, a free people must now choose to shape the forces of the Information Age and the global society, to unleash the limitless potential of all our people, and yes, to form a more perfect union.
Augustus gradually increased his powers, taking over those of the senate, the executives and the laws. The aristocracy received wealth and position in proportion to their willingness to accept slavery. The state had been transformed, and the old Roman character gone for ever. Equality among citizens was completely abandoned. All now waited on the imperial command.
But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.
History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.
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