There is a deep and undeniable sadness in all this: whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good that will never be overcome by evil – an evil that is itself eternal but will never succeed in overcoming good – whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it "koagulations viatmin" for its role in blood clotting.

Our relationship to the past is marked by deep indifference, even if we do say something to the contrary, even if we mean what we say when we say it is a matter of the greatest significance. Because it is a matter of the greatest significance, yet nevertheless we feel bound to it by a sense of duty.

Finding the stewardess, Bly asked her about the monkey. The stewardess replied drily, "We have met." Bly was now alarmed to see that the stewardess's arm was bandaged from wrist to shoulder."What did you do?" she asked. "I did nothing but scream," the stewardess replied; "the monkey did the rest.

If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

In many ways the recent history of the Ukraine can be seen as an intensified version of the history of our era. Most of the political issues are familiar to us. Most of the methods used to meet those issues are also familiar. Events in the Ukraine prefigured events through the rest of the world...

That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found...

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter, as witness the pagan elements in medieval Christianity and the evolution of the Russian "KGB" from the czarist secret service that preceded it

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself

From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.

Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] "How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.