No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded the individual.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

It is impossible, in our condition of Society, not to be sometimes a Snob.

We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people – a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it’s time to turn the page.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

I can’t imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I don’t think we handled the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad as well as we might have. But that’s now history.

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

Pop music will never be low brow.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Most people are happy being average. Most are happy being faceless in a sea of faces.

My view of my role is that together with like-minded men and women, I could help contribute to a bipartisan view of American engagement in the world for another period; I could do my part to overcome this really, in a way, awful period in which we are turning history into personal recriminations, depriving our political system of a serious debate.

Every time there has been an effort by the Haitian people to overcome the misery and poverty that comes from 200 years of bitter attacks, really bitter, the U.S. steps in and blocks it.

Where do the evils like corruption arise from? It comes from the never-ending greed. The fight for corruption-free ethical society will have to be fought against this greed and replace it with ‚what can I give‘ spirit.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.

Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.

Well, Apple invented the PC as we know it, and then it invented the graphical user interface as we know it eight years later (with the introduction of the Mac). But then, the company had a decade in which it took a nap.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

All the United States, it is a society that is split like to the bottom, that had very poor people in the country that is one of the wealthiest countries.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman without a single drop of bad blood – certainly not German blood.

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it’s a subject below their social standing.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Dancing was always part of my culture growing up in Barbados. When I shot my 1st video I worked really hard with my choreographer to perfect the routines.

Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

When General Allenby conquered Jerusalem during World War I, he was hailed in the American press as Richard the Lion-Hearted, who had at last won the Crusades and driven the pagans out of the Holy Land.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

It’s a very good historical book about history.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.

The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

Oh, yes; you Virginians shed barrels of perspiration while standing off at a distance and superintending the work your slaves do for you. It is different with us. Here it is every fellow for himself, or he doesn’t get there.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Yes, the Bible should be taught in our schools because it is necessary to understand the Bible if we are to truly understand our own culture and how it came to be. The Bible has influenced every part of western culture from our art, music, and history, to our sense of fairness, charity, and business.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.

My roots are in Paris, and I will not pull them up.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.