• history

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don’t want to study the social sciences, because it’s not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

Barney Frank

• history

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran’s ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?

Azar Nafisi

• history

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

Claude Vorilhon

• history

For most of our history, Americans enjoyed both liberty and security from foreign threats.

Harry Browne

• history

If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.

Strom Thurmond

• history

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Carlos Fuentes

• history

Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first – forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so the new thirty days at Promises Malibu! But it sets a dangerous precedent to jail celebs just because someone hates them.

Rob Sheffield

• history

It would be incredibly presumptuous and self-serving of me to believe that Facebook was the end of history. The only way it could possibly be the end of history is if it becomes some sort of artificial super intelligence that takes over the world.

Sean Parker

• history

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world’s main religions?

Polly Toynbee

• history

Nixon’s full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country’s history.

Conrad Black

• history

When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.

Lev Grossman

• history

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that’s least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

Tom Hayden

• history

While history never repeats itself, political patterns do.

Eric Alterman

• history

For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world.

Conrad Black

• history

I have behind me not only the splendid traditions and the annals of more than a thousand years but the living strength and majesty of the Commonwealth and Empire of societies old and new of lands and races different in history and origins but all, by God’s Will, united in spirit and in aim.

Queen Elizabeth II