World History Quotes

Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail ~ John Ashbery

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. ~ Dave Barry

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle," he said. "We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world. ~ George W. Bush

The foolishness of the politicians of that era brought on the "First World War" But it was the people that had to fight it. The trenches that the soldiers dug and the craters from the artillery are still visible to visitors. The cemeteries where the fallen are buried, show that the majority were just young men, whereas the politicians, who were to blame, had mostly white hair and did little or no fighting! To secure our future we must read and learn from history! ~ Hank Bracker

One of its (civilisations) most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised, with those who do not -or cannot be trusted to - share our values. Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. ~ Mary Beard

We were happy a hundred years ago. We knew that there were exploiters and exploited, wealthy and poor, and we had a perfect idea of how to get rid of injustice; we would expropriate the owners and turn the wealth over to the common good. We expropriated the owners and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history. And we keep repeating that in principle everything was all right, only some unfortunate accidents slipped in and slightly spoiled the good idea. Now let us start afresh ... ~ Leszek Kolakowski

To picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated? ~ David Mamet

White men in Europe and the US are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world; it is called the history of the world. ~ Michael Kimmel

Judging from the main portions of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy. ~ Walt Whitman

90 percent of my time is spent on 10 percent of the world. ~ Colin Powell

All I know is that history repeats itself and people are going to want to experience the world. But I know then they are going to have a better appreciation for what is here in Maine. ~ John Baldacci

For the next ten years, until 1251, she and a small group of other women controlled the largest empire in world history. ~ Jack Weatherford

Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. ~ Leon Trotsky

Answer to Job : 601 was an anticipation in the grand manner, but everything still hung in mid air as mere revelation that never came down to earth. In view of these facts one cannot, with the best will in the world, see how Christianity, as we hear over and over again, is supposed to have burst upon world history as an absolute novelty. If ever anything had been historically prepared, and sustained and supported by the existing Weltanschauung, Christianity would be a classic example. XII ~ C. G. Jung

The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort
"happiness." He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering. ~ Oswald Spengler

France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine. ~ William Arthur Sirmon

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world. ~ J.M. Blaut

Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World. ~ Christopher Columbus

It's very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a critical turning point and, as I say; the tools, the data that holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available: it is among us, but it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against, and it's up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us at some point in the future, which is: What did you do to help save the world? ~ Terence McKenna

The Church and her exegesis of revelation progress through the ever-changing periods of world history. New aspects emerge, while others wane; efforts are made to compensate for one-sided emphases, but not rarely they are simply replaced with the opposite extremes. Today too, then, it is a duty to restate the principles in a new and timely way - while being as measured as possible - and in so doing to retrieve what is of permanent value. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world. ~ Carl Lotus Becker

America has become and was the exception to the way most of the people in the world were forced to live, because America was the first formally built, structured country on the premise that the people ran the show based on their liberty, based on their natural God-given rights to pursue happiness. The right to life, the right to freedom and to pursue happiness. No other country in the history of the world had ever been formed or founded on such premises. This one was. That was the exception. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The loyal dogs of a dictator are much more dangerous than the dictator himself because a dictator can bite you only through his supporters. Without his dogs, he is nothing! More's the pity, the world history is full of such loyal biters! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

If you want to ma history make a difference. ~ Kevin A. McKoy

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children's plays, adult plays ... I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year's, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what's left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that ~ Charles Bukowski

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world. ~ Victor Cousin

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The United States has experienced more than two centuries of political stability. When viewed against the background of world history, this is remarkable. The First Amendment has played a singularly important role. When citizens can openly criticize their government, changes come about through orderly political processes. When grievances exist, they must be aired, if not through the channels of public debate, then by riots in the streets. The First Amendment functions as a safety valve through which the pressures and frustrations of a heterogeneous society can be ventilated and defused. ~ Jacqueline R. Kanovitz

All equally see in the convulsion in America an era in the history of the world, out of which must come in the end a general recognition of the right of mankind to the produce of their labor and the pursuit of happiness. ~ Charles Francis Adams, Sr.

I do not regard the procuring of peace as a matter in which we should play the role of arbiter between different opinions ... more that of an honest broker who really wants to press the business forward. ~ Otto Von Bismarck

Assassination has never changed the history of the world. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

The number one problem in academia today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors, who have substituted narrow "expertise" and "theoretical sophistication" (a preposterous term) for breadth and depth of learning in the world history of art and thought ... Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Overconcentration on any one point is a distortion. This is one of the primary reasons for the dullness and ineptitude of so much twentieth-criticism, as compared to nineteenth-century belles-lettres. ~ Camille Paglia

There is obstruction. Enlightenment is not very popular in this world. History tells us that enlightened teachers who made themselves largely available to human beings had problems. ~ Frederick Lenz

I believe that architecture is fundamentally a public space where people can gather and communicate, think about the history, think about the lives of human beings, or the world. ~ Tadao Ando

Hegel did not deceive himself about the revolutionary character of his dialectic, and was even afraid that his Philosophy of Right would be banned. Nor was the Prussian state entirely easy in its mind for all its idealization. Proudly leaning on its police truncheon, it did not want to have its reality justified merely by its reason. Even the dull-witted King saw the serpent lurking beneath the rose: when a distant rumor of his state philosopher's teachings reached him he asked suspiciously: but what if I don't dot the I's or cross the T's? The Prussian bureaucracy meanwhile was grateful for the laurel wreath that had been so generously plaited for it, especially since the strict Hegelians clarified their master's obscure words for the understanding of the common subjects, and one of them wrote a history of Prussian law and the Prussian state, where the Prussian state was proved to be a gigantic harp strung in God's garden to lead the universal anthem. Despite its sinister secrets Hegel's philosophy was declared to be the Prussian state philosophy, surely one of the wittiest ironies of world history. Hegel had brought together the rich culture of German Idealism in one mighty system, he had led all the springs and streams of our classical age into one bed, where they now froze in the icy air of reaction. but the rash fools who imagined they were safely hidden behind this mass of ice, who presumptuously rejoiced who bold attackers fell from its steep and slippery slopes, littl ~ Franz Mehring

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race. ~ Michelle Alexander

In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history. As a militant, she is an integral part of all liberations. ~ Helene Cixous

World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies. ~ Oswald Spengler

RIH, we love you, Rih we are proud of you- Many go away and forget their roots- But you are not one of them at all-Every Crop over, you return to the island to fete-And meet up with fans you haven't already met.
You travel the world-representing your country-Putting 246 down in
World History... ~ Charmaine J.Forde

The internet has grown so tremendously fast in our society. It is the fastest communications technology in the history of the world. (It) grew from almost a dead stop in 1995 to having 80 million users in the United States alone in five years. Nothing has grown that fast. ~ William E. Kennard

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake. ~ Walter Benjamin

Columbus was one of the great heroes of world history, to be admired for his daring feat of imagination and courage. In my account, I acknowledged that he was an intrepid sailor, but also pointed out (based on his own journal and the reports of many eyewitnesses) that he was vicious in his treatment of the gentle Arawak Indians who greeted his arrival in this hemisphere. He enslaved them, tortured them, murdered them - all in the pursuit of wealth. He represented, I suggested, the worst values of Western civilization: greed, violence, exploitation, racism, conquest, hypocrisy ~ Howard Zinn

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world. ~ Don DeLillo

The battlefields where the dice of world history have been thrown can never be ordinary fields again and no god from a vanished civilization is so dead that he does not live on in his ruined temple. ~ Goran Schildt

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species. ~ Paul Johnson

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. ~ Rose Macaulay

Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding," Joseph exclaimed. "If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn't there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?"
The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: "There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht - I can see that they already have begun. ~ Hermann Hesse

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world. ~ Arthur Golden

Beer for breakfast, ale for lunch, stout with dinner and a few mugs in between. The average Northern European, including women and children drank three liters of beer a day. That's almost two six-packs, but often the beer had a much higher alcoholic content. People in positions of power, like the police, drank much more. Finnish soldiers were given a ration of five liters of strong ale a day (about as much as seven six-packs). Monks in Sussex made do with 12 cans worth. ~ Stewart Lee Allen

Once upon a time, there was a civilization in the eastern side of the world. It was one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet that existed during that time.
This civilization was the glorious Indus valley civilization. No, I am not talking about India. I am talking about the land of greatness that got lost in time. Today, in the same geographical location of that great civilization, we have a piece of earth, which is known as "India". But do not mistake it to be the same glorious land that existed thousands of years ago, along with other magnificent civilizations, such as the Greeks, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians etc. ~ Abhijit Naskar

For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

This is the best day in the history of the world, even though yesterday that seemed an impossibility. ~ Jack Kent Cooke

Tolkien came to regard the tale of Beren and Tinuviel as 'the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, "the wheels of the world", are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak'. Such a worldview is inherent in the fairy-tale (and Christian) idea of the happy ending in which the dispossessed are restored to joy; but perhaps Tolkien was also struck by the way it had been borne out in the Great War, when ordinary people stepped out of ordinary lives to carry the fate of nations. ~ John Garth

If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers. ~ Peter Hoeg

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion. ~ Samuel Butler

For the first time in world history the peasant was destined to find a leader in the person of the worker. In that lies the fundamental, and you may say the whole, difference between the Russian Revolution and all those preceding it. In ~ Leon Trotsky

P4- the history that now effects everyman is world history ~ C. Wright Mills

I think that both men, Bush and Blair, will be damned in history. Both men have made their respective countries the two most hated countries in the world. ~ George Galloway

If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Rest in Peace?' Why that phrase? That's the most ridiculous phrase I've ever heard! You die, and they say 'Rest in Peace!' …Why would one need to 'rest' when they're dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d'Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I'm only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won't need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on. ~ Roman Payne

You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. [and then you discover that others have suffered much more than you and your problems look good in comparison] ~ James A. Baldwin

The human intellect has not been able to conceive of anything more noble and sublime in the history of the world than the teachings of the Upanishads. ~ Sivananda

Before history there was science, of a sort. At any moment nature presents us with a variety of puzzling phenomena: fire, thunderstorms, plagues, planetary motion, light, tides, and so on. Observation of the world led to useful generalizations: fires are hot; thunder presages rain; tides are highest when the Moon is full or new, and so on. These became part of the common sense of mankind. But here and there, some people wanted more than just a collection of facts. They wanted to explain the world. ~ Steven Weinberg

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. ~ Harry S. Truman

'Who Is This Man?' is about the impact of Jesus on human history. Most people - including most Christians - simply have no idea of the extent to which we live in a Jesus-impacted world. ~ John Ortberg

All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world. ~ F. Sionil Jose

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have. ~ Hilary Mantel

The truth is that climate alarmism has become the most expensive, and the most wasteful, project in the history of the world. It is junk economics built on junk science. It amounts to no more than hot air, yet it looks set to beggar our grandchildren. ~ Roger Helmer

No doctor has ever healed anyone of anything in the history of the world, The human immune system heals and that's the only thing that heals ~ Bob Wright

Religion is responsible for a lot of the problems in the history of the world and it's not something that I practice or recommend, but to each his own. ~ Salman Rushdie

We have to save the history we have. You never know what small bit of it might change your life
or change the whole world. ~ Jack Gantos

World history is a court of judgment ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

There remains an experience of incomparable value ... to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled
in short, from the perspective of those who suffer ... to look with new eyes on matters great and small. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Now you listen to me," says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. "You've given birth to two children and quite soon will be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now ... I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well." And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he'll ever give her. "Because you are not a complete twit. ~ Fredrik Backman

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history. ~ Albert Schweitzer

How such Ideals do realize themselves; and grow, wondrously, from amid the incongruous ever-fluctuating chaos of the Actual: this is what World-History, if it teach any thing, has to teach us, How they grow; and, after long stormy growth, bloom out mature, supreme; then quickly (for the blossom is brief) fall into decay; sorrowfully dwindle; and crumble down, or rush down, noisily or noiselessly disappearing. The blossom is so brief; as of some centennial Cactus-flower, which after a century of waiting shines out for hours! ~ Thomas Carlyle

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach. ~ Aldous Huxley

Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety. ~ N. T. Wright

It isn't polls or public opinion at the moment that counts. It is right and wrong and leadership
men with fortitude, honesty, and a belief in the right that makes epochs in the history of the world. ~ Harry S. Truman

The pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it's by-God democratic. Sneer if you dare; this is something new in world history. ~ Molly Ivins

Ask her who means freedom, whose name is love. Do not inquire of your intellect, do not search backwards through world history. Your soul will not blame you for having cared too little about politics, for having exerted yourself too little, hated your enemies too little, or too little fortified your frontiers. But she will perhaps blame you for so often having feared and fled from her demands, for never having had time to give her, your youngest and fairest child, no time to play with her, no time to listen to her song, for often having sold her for money, betrayed her for advancement ... You will be neurotic and a foe to life
so says your soul
if you neglect me, and you will be destroyed if you do not turn to me with a wholly new love and concern. ~ Hermann Hesse

More often and more insistently as that time recedes, we are asked by the young who our "torturers" were, of what cloth were they made. The term torturers alludes to our ex-guardians, the SS, and is in my opinion inappropriate: it brings to mind twisted individuals, ill-born, sadists, afflicted by an original flaw. Instead, they were made of the same cloth as we, they were average human beings, averagely intelligent, averagely wicked: save the exceptions, they were not monsters, they had our faces, but they had been reared badly. They were, for the greater part, diligent followers and functionaries, some frantically convinced of the Nazi doctrine, many indifferent, or fearful of punishment, or desirous of a good career, or too obedient. All of them had been subjected to the terrifying miseducation provided for and imposed by the schools created in accordance with the wishes of Hitler and his collaborators, and then completed by the SS "drill." Many had joined this militia because of the prestige it conferred, because of its omnipotence, or even just to escape family problems. Some, very few in truth, had changes of heart, requested transfers to the front lines, gave cautious help to prisoners or chose suicide. Let it be clear that to a greater or lesser degree all were responsible, but it must bee just as clear that behind their responsibility stands that the great majority of Germans who accepted in the beginning, out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and na ~ Primo Levi

Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part. ~ C. Wright Mills

I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world. ~ Lionel Suggs

In 1970, there were approximately 330,000 prisoners in the US. Today there are 2.3 million behind bars - more than any country in the history of the world. In 2009 alone there were 1.6 million drug-related arrests in the U.S. 1.3 million of these were for possession of drugs alone. Over half were related to marijuana. The forty-year war on drugs has cost $2.5 trillion. ~ Sam Branson

I agree with ... actually it was [Joseph] Stalin who said that [Winston Churchill] he was a man who changed the history of the world and I think, if he had not been there in 1940, it might very well have been the case that we would have collapsed like France, and I shall honor him always for that. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

India has created a special momentum in world history as a country to be searched for knowledge. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Our nation was created in ways that allow human potential to prosper, and it created the greatest nation for people in the history of humanity. Now Obama is dismantling it, because he has no appreciation for our greatness. In fact, he resents it. He blames this country for whatever evils he sees around the world. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended periods of peace is when there has been a balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitors that the danger of war arises. ~ Richard M. Nixon

We've not been assigned to hang out until He returns we've been given a message and a power that completely revolutionizes life. Why would anyone want to get up in the morning and not shape the course of world history? ~ Bill Johnson

I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor ... Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger. ~ Winston Churchill

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. ~ Derek Walcott

After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past? ~ Robert Dale Owen

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. ~ Karl Marx

So, at one extreme you have indigenous, tribal societies trying to stem the race to disaster. At the other extreme, the richest, most powerful societies in world history, like the United States and Canada, are racing full-speed ahead to destroy the environment as quickly as possible. ~ Noam Chomsky

If there is one leader to whom most Chinese people express gratitude for improvements in their daily lives, it is Deng Xiaoping. Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history? ~ Ezra F. Vogel

It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world. ~ Thomas Friedman