The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear.Eric Packer about Vija Kinski

Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about people - people like you and me who did things to change the world.

Force persuades a person to speak, but it cannot guarantee his honesty. Quite the reverse: it will extract confessions from innocents and lies from simple sinners...

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It’s not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It’s what comes before history that isn’t boring.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived.

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

There are moments when one feels a desperate gratitude for museums, whatever their own ambiguous histories. Their objects from lost cities lead us back to who we are.

Nyonya barangkali sudah mendengar, bahwa bagi orang Jawa tidak ada kegagalan hidup yabg lebih besar dari pada perempuan yabg tidak kawin, yang sekaligus merupakan aib.

Those who don’t know history may be bound to repeat it. But even people who know it may follow the same fate if they interpret it exclusively in their own favor.

Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.

How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.