Quotes About History

Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.

History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem.

At the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century in Austria, there was a lot of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism in Austria was much more pervasive than in Germany. And Austrians took to Nazi ideas and anti-Semitism much more readily than Germans did, really.

We have learned from history that change is never easy, that it usually doesn't look pretty, especially in today's politically-charged environment where intent and actions can readily be misconstrued and judged.

Our nation has a regrettable history of drawing down our forces and readiness after each conflict, only to find ourselve ill-prepared for the next great struggle.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

I'm really into reading books right now about India. You reach a certain age where you start missing your home history.

It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected - and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?

I still remember March 31, 1981, when a deeply disturbed John Hinckley Jr. took aim at President Ronald Reagan and fired shots that hospitalized the Commander-in-Chief and two others, and left his Press Secretary James Brady paralyzed for life.

If we have George W. Bush as president, we're going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.

Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime - may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.

Reagan was the conservative Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Reagan's dead, and he was a lousy President.

Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.

Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.

Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.

No politician was more maligned than Ronald Reagan.

I have been hung in effigy by the gay community for a long time, from when I was on President Reagan's first AIDS commission.

We all should be concerned if our kids don't know who Sandra Day O'Connor, John Adams, and Ronald Reagan are.

I don't think anybody is - no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time.

The Reagan Revolution has had no second act.