Quotes About History

Yet, nearly 6 decades after the Holocaust concluded, Anti-Semitism still exists as the scourge of the world.

My favorite book is 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson.

At the turn of the 20th century, the disparity in literacy here in the U.S. largely came down to race. Nearly half of minorities at that time - 45 percent - were illiterate, while 94 percent of white citizens were literate.

I'm the fourth generation to be in show business. It's pretty neat; it's nice to have that family history.

I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

As the president put the Medal of Honor around my neck, I felt the history and the weight of a nation.

This name Mandela is an albatross around the necks of my family.

You know the puritan ethic that started out four centuries ago in this country, needless to say - at least for the moment - a thing of the past - from what I can tell.

Negative politics have always been around.

Of course, I know everything that happens in Russia. But even at the most dangerous moment or the most negative moment now, it's still 10 times better than what it was in the communist state.

We have been concentrating on the banks, business and our bellies. We have neglected the spiritual and cultural. It was because Rome and Athens neglected these things that they fell.

Alexander II really used autocracy well to negotiate the freeing of the serfs in 1861.

Everybody's got baggage, and not just the classic, 'Oh I have so much baggage,' but everyone comes with so much context, and you're not just dating a person: you're dating all their context, too. Part of relationships is negotiating each other's context.

Soho is a gritty former mercantile area that has, of course, evolved into the most bourgeois neighborhood in New York.

My neighborhood in South London was very Dickensian.

When my family first moved to Hempstead in the 1960s, they were one of the first black families. It used to be an all-white neighborhood, but there was white flight when the black people with money started moving in. When I was, like, 13 or 14, Hempstead had just become all black, and the poverty became worse and worse.

In the neighborhood that I grew up in - in New York on Long Island - there were a lot of musicians. For some reason, that time in history in our town in New York, everybody played. So it was all around me.

Detroit in its heyday - let's say, 1920s to the '60s - was never a huge downtown-living thing. People lived in the neighborhoods.

I have always lived in Amsterdam. During the war, we inhabited the Rivieren neighborhood where many Jews lived at the time. Our downstairs neighbors were Jews, and there were also Jews a few houses from us. We saw how they were rounded up and taken away. That made a very great impression on me.

Neil Armstrong, when he was out there landing on the moon, I was there first.

I remember; I was 15 years old when Neil Armstrong put feet in the moon.

A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.

On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the most expensive selfie in history. As the apex of an 8-year, $130 billion effort, they posed in front of a camera and took a shot designed to do one thing - to show our free enterprise democratic system was better than the rigid, authoritarian system that wanted to destroy us.