Quotes About History

Istanbul is an unbelievable city, just really beautiful and the people are really, really nice.

I think the English are an unbelievably musical nation and always have been.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

You see, every creature alive on the earth today represents an unbroken line of life that stretches back to the first primitive organism to appear on this planet; and that is about three billion years.

Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very uncertain.

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once 'The Unnecessary War'.

War is a horribly fascinating thing.

All civilizations at some time have fallen into this total terror, when the mystery of life was a kind of panic only to be assuaged by the spilling of blood.

World War I broke out largely because of an arms race, and World War II because of the lack of an arms race.

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.

Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than War.

Everything connected with war and warlike exploits is interesting to a boy.

No two wars are identical.

The stench of the trail of Ego in our History. It is ego - ego, the fountain cry, origin, sole source of war.

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.

Powder is but a thing of yesterday, and war is as old as the human race--unhappily.

Germany lost the Second World War. Fascism won it. Believe me, my friend.

If Japan had been near to either England or France, war would have broken out long ago.

Wars come and wars go but the world does not change: it will always forget an indebtedness which it thinks it expedient not to remember.

The military played polo. Polo, really, started as a game to train for war.

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

I was 20 years old at Pearl Harbor. I was in the Navy about a year and four months before the war.