Quotes About History

First-ever woman to have an iron-man match. It's been such a long time, to be the second woman ever to main event a Raw.

For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.

J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s.

I'm really good at math and history, but I suck in English.

Every empire has to get sucked down the drain. As a British person, I know how it feels.

I'm a sucker for period pieces. There is always great opportunity for research and to delude yourself into feeling like you are in a different time and place.

I'm kind of a sucker for the retro-diagnoses.

The Germs' contribution to history sucks as far as I'm concerned.

The Sudan bombing is a blot on the Clinton presidency, and a blot it ought to remain.

I am extremely proud to be a part of the NBA's first game in Africa. Coming from South Sudan and having participated in the Basketball without Borders Africa camps in Johannesburg previously, I am truly honored to be part of this historic event.

Disinformation has always existed. It's not like all of a sudden we've just discovered this new thing called propaganda.

The sudden collapse of the monarchy that had ruled Russia for three hundred years led to chaos. Russia immediately became, as one participant put it, 'the freest country in the world.'

I think the way to think about the impact of Hiroshima is to think about it as a sudden shift in the balance of power.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

Historically speaking, institutions are slow to change and usually resistant to any sudden moves - churches especially so.

I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking over an archaeological site. And you can't see anything on the ground, and pull back hundreds of miles in space, and all of a sudden you can see streets and roads and houses and even pyramids.

There is nothing new about the sudden enthusiasm for aggressive government intervention during a health crisis. Throughout history, pandemics have led to an expansion of the power of the state.

Deportation isn't something that is suddenly new.

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.

My family didn't film anything. But then you look deeper and realize, maybe there are photographs, there are things. It's also context: You give something a context, and suddenly it becomes really deep or meaningful footage.

'The Secret River' began because, at the age of 50, I suddenly realised I knew nothing about how my own family had got its foothold in Australia.

The question I am most often asked is how do I find my ideas? The answer is I don't. Ideas find me. A character in history will suddenly step right out of the past and demand a book. Generally, people don't bother to speak to me unless there's a good chance that I'll take them on.

When then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued me in 2003 over my stewardship as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE's legal expenses were more than $100 million, which made it perhaps the priciest litigation in the state's history.