Explore Quotes on History

Conflicting views and contrasting ideas are the essence of all great debates throughout history, from the Greeks to the Oxford Union Debating Society. Today, we turn to television for the creative clash of ideas on matters that touch our lives.

I like work, I like song writing, and I like the history of Atlantic Records. They've sat in the studio with so many artists - like Ray Charles, for example - and created something amazing. As a label, they seem to be great at growing bands rather than telling you how to do it.

What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.

Evading military service has a long history in American life.

I started looking into horse history books and came across the actual story of this half-breed endurance horseman and his painted mustang Hidalgo. I wasn't really sure if I was going to do the movie at that point.

I grew up with a fascination with Marco Polo. I had this unlikely interest in the East as a young man, and you can't really read about Chinese history and philosophy without encountering him at every turn.

I was interviewing an elder, Chief Fool's Crow, who was the ceremonial chief. He was 103 years old. I was getting his information on the history of Lakota horses. He told me the story of Hidalgo and Frank Hopkins.

Throughout Philippine history, it's the immigrants who built fortunes and, in the process, helped build Philippine economy.

You can always say that it was scarce dollars when Lewis and Clark wanted to go to the West Coast and explore the West. And people complained about it, I understand, from a reading of the history books.

The comforting news for every American is that our men and women in uniform, and every Marine, is as good today as any in our history.

It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.

Barack Obama's convention speech in 2004 had made him a political star, and he arrived in Iowa to crowds unseen in caucus history.

The 2008 battle in Iowa for the Democratic caucus was perhaps the most titanic single nominating contest in the history of modern politics.

I'm immensely proud to be a Democrat because of our party's history of fighting for justice, fairness, and equality. From Roosevelt to Obama, we've worked to bring seniors and children out of poverty, expanded civil rights, supported science and research, and pushed for equality of opportunity.

I'm a blue-collar kid who went on to become a successful entrepreneur. I was the youngest CEO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. Now I've served my country for six years in the House of Representatives.

I've always liked the history of the game of football, and then, when you mention the Cleveland Browns to me, it brings back vast memories, and I can't just wait to try to build and establish this thing and just move this thing forward.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.

I don't understand why black people have been so quiescent, so passive over the hundreds of years of American history. Why hasn't there been more violence, more armed struggle? I know answers to some of that, but it seems to me it's an issue of faith, an abiding faith in some sort of great beyond, or great spirit, or even in the American dream.

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.