Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We rarely know who our ancestors were. Who can even remember the names of their great-grandparents? They have vanished into the dim and distant past
Fear has been the original parent of superstition, and every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of their invisible enemies.
The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved the peace by a constant preparation for war.
[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.
People who make films don't think they have any obligation to help bring (perpetrators) to justice. They are only interested in art, not in justice.
I admire Lincoln enormously and I think what's interesting about Lincoln is how he changes, it's not that he held the same view throughout his life.
Keep your eye fixed not so much on what they [people] ought in reason to do, as on what they are likely to do based on their disposition and habits.
If there is going to be change, real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves. That's how change happens.
Being fired has some of the advantages of dying without its supreme disadvantages. People say extra-nice things about you, and you get to hear them.
Films, media, educational system and arts portray Muslims in a racist and negative way. The more interesting question is who is behind these images.
Leadership, in short, is power governed by principle, directed toward raising people to their highest levels of personal motive and social morality.
Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.
As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.
One of the benefits of working outside the U.K. is that I don't have to keep fielding media/politicians' enquiries about 'Britishness' and its ills.
Scientists are scientists. They're not really in a position to speak clearly on the moral dimensions, and they're not really comfortable doing that.
There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.
One of the main arguments that I make in my new book, 'The Great Degeneration,' is that the rule of law in the U.S. is becoming the rule of lawyers.
One should never allow chaos to develop in order to avoid going to war, because one does not avoid a war but instead puts it off to his disadvantage
Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.
Each side tries to legitimize their aims by appealing to history, sometimes selectively choosing episodes and other times just by inventing history.
Real love is fighting like hell to hold on to every moment you have with her. It’s making a life together and making it work no matter what happens.
It is true that I have known Straussians almost all my life. And the one thing I was taught about them from the earliest age is that they are wrong.
As far as I'm concerned, the 20th century was performance-driven, but for some reason, the critics and historians didn't know how to integrate that.
In private enterprises men may advance or recede, whereas they who aim at empire have no alternative between the highest success and utter downfall.
The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.
The United States is facing serious pushback from Turkey, which is not comfortable with the view that the Islamic State is a terrorist organization.
We are used to thinking of Amazon myths in terms of violence against uppity women, but the ancient evidence also reveals a vision of gender equality.
[Liberty] considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.
Contrary to popular belief, there are lots of actions on the part of Jefferson and Hemings that "speak" about the basic nature of their relationship.
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
Islam explicitly rejects dictatorship and there are no traditions of the Prophet or passages in the Qur'an which clearly give dictators this support.
Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions.
From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.
In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.
When in all the nations of the world the rule of law is the darling of the leaders and the plague of the people, we ought to begin to recognize this.
It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but if someone tries to take them from us, we defend them with almost an illicit passion.
Animal life, sombre mystery. All nature protests against the barbarity of man, who misapprehends, who humiliates, who tortures his inferior brethren.
Even leaving aside its military bases, America's influence on the domestic ordering of British life has been enormous, though sometimes unrecognised.
Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.
Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.
With virtually no knowledge of or interest in history, the masses simply take their unprecedented high living standards under capitalism for granted.
When we're talking about the "American response" to any disaster, it's not just a government response, an official response, it's a popular response.
Goering's ideas betray a consistent desire to create something essentially new, implying all the historic virtues, but unlike [anything] of the past.
Political scientists have long argued that party identification is the best possible predictor of voting behavior and is remarkably sticky over time.
It is very difficult for [people] to accept the idea that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy.
Americans feel as though the only position they can possibly occupy is number one and if they're not number one, well, the end of the world has come.
To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.
All inconsiderate enterprises are impetuous at first, but soon lanquish. [Lat., Omnia inconsulti impetus coepta, initiis valida, spatio languescunt.]