Quotes About History

I don't think there is much history can say about me. I just want to be remembered as part of that collective.

Generally my instinct is to not do biographical movies. I want to build characters and not be locked into playing a part in history.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

I woke up one day and thought: I want to write a book about the history of my body. I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

Fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem. It is futile to want the old days back, but that doesn't mean one should ignore the lessons of the visitable past.

Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go.

We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time,or as the greatest criminals

The reason why China suffers bitterly from endless wars is because of the existence of feudal lords and kings.

One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Before the war it was always the United States *are*, after the war it was the United States is... it made us an is.

The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Dunkirk has fallen... with it has ended the greatest battle of world history. Soldiers! My confidence in you knew no bounds. You have not disappointed me.

If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.

I met someone from the German side and we both shared the same opinion: we fought, we finished and we were friends... It wasn't worth it.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy.

The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years.

Time sets all things right. Error lives but a day. Truth is eternal.

Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: 'Do not march on Moscow'... Rule 2 is: Do not go fighting with your land armies in China.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannonball.

I believe it is peace for our time.