If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history they were at it all the time that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.
I think that the entertainment industry itself has a history of chasing success. Any time a hit product comes out all the other companies start chasing after that success and trying to recreate it by putting out similar products.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Classes struggle some classes triumph others are eliminated. Such is history such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.
This empire unlike any other in the history of the world has been built primarily through economic manipulation through cheating through fraud through seducing people into our way of life through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.
Jews have a special relationship to books and the Haggadah has been translated more widely and reprinted more often than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy not a prayer book user's manual timeline poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
With the perspective afforded by the passage of time where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families innocents going about their lives suddenly and brutally murdered no other day can ever matter as much.
Let me tell you never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.
If I were beginning my career today I don't think I would take the same direction. Television is at a crossroads at the moment. And although I am not up to date technologically I suspect that somewhere out there people are conveying things about natural history by means other than television and I think if I were beginning today I'd be there.
The truth is of course that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
It's in the history books the Holocaust. It's just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
We have our own history our own language our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.
I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years.
In the tumult of men and events solitude was my temptation now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that he is a centrist just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.
It's a struggle but that's why we exist so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves or their history all over again.
Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.
Unlike any other leader in modern American history we are led today by a president that has decided to pit Americans against each other.
Storytelling in general is a communal act. Throughout human history people would gather around whether by the fire or at a tavern and tell stories. One person would chime in then another maybe someone would repeat a story they heard already but with a different spin. It's a collective process.
Throughout human history the American Idea has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.
'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class apart from redneck which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
A strange thing is memory and hope one looks backward and the other forward one is of today the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain memory is a painter it paints pictures of the past and of the day.