Quotes About History

When I won the belt, it was kind of a precedent... The only Canadian to have ever held it.

Could that have been what happened to the human race - a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million years?

I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

When I joined Bill Clinton's start-up presidential campaign in 1991, I was confident that women would play an ever more important role, but I never gave a minute's thought to what would happen if we won. When we did - and I became the first woman to serve as White House press secretary - it changed my life. But it didn't change the world.

The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.

Truman fired the popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he disobeyed orders in the Korean War. Johnson knew that he had reached the endgame in Vietnam when Gen. William Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, requested 240,000 more troops in 1968 for the prolonged war that also could not be won.

These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.

I discovered that there is Indian blood in my ancestry on my father's side - a fact that had not been talked about in my family. No wonder I've often been cast in exotic roles - Indian princesses, Russian revolutionaries, Algerians, Gypsies and Greeks.

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?

I wonder what it's like to be from a state that is spread across a few islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, only added to the United States in 1959. Not only that but to be the birthplace of America's first black president? Pretty cool, I bet.

Thinking of that movie 'The Artist'; if anyone ever needed to reach anyone, I'm just thinking they didn't have cell phones, they didn't have Internet, they didn't have email, so I always wonder how it was back then where you had to be home if you needed to get a phone call; otherwise, people couldn't get a hold of you.

I always wonder about people's history and their lives, especially people that are a little bit more distant, who obviously have had some kind of a thing, and you know there's some reason why they're not able to connect. It's not because they don't want to. They don't have the ability.

I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

We do not wonder that there is conflict in the world. There is now, and has been from the time that Cain slew Abel, so much of hatred.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

I wonder what it was like to be an actor years ago. We're so respected now and I don't think it does us any good. We used to be vagabonds. I want to be a vagabond!

Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.

Wonder Woman' is thinking about me. It's thinking about my pleasure, about my sisters, about the history of cinema and women's representation. It gives us joy but also rage.

I just feel honored to play Wonder Woman in some incarnation. She's got such history, and she's, like, the first female superhero.

With 'Wonder Woman,' I did one story with Alex Ross, and I had a lot of fun doing it, but I don't think I could do a 'Wonder Woman' book on a regular basis, because there's so much history there and so much mythology and everything.