"We found this pile of huge stones. You'd think somebody would be repairing them, but nobody's doing anything What a waste! In the States, this would be a Wal-Mart by now." - Dave Barry, on Stonehenge.
"History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it." - Winston Churchill
"To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. Now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!...Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder" - Winston Churchill
"History is the most powerful intellectual tool society possesses. Let us be clear. History is not a dispassionate record fo dead events. Nor is it a playground for scholars to indulge their trivial disputes. The purpose of history is to explain the present - to say why the world around us is the way it is. History tells us what is important in our world, and how it came to be. It tells us why the things we value are the things we should value. And it tells us what is to be ignored, or discarded." - Bob Doniger, Michael Crichton's Timeline
"This country was not built by men who relied on somebody else to take care of them. It was built by men who relied on themselves, who dared to shape their own lives, who had enough courage to blaze new trails -- enough confidence themselves to take the necessary risks." - J. Ollie Edmunds
"History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom." - Milton Friedman
"A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future." - Robert A. Heinlein
"Is most of our culture crap? You bet it is. But 90% of everything is crap; at least our crap has a fresh stink, instead of the stink of ages." - Stephen Green
"Rousseau's reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit." - Paul Johnson
"The [French] Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien regime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all essentials, if on an experimental basis, more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century. It also became, as Professor Herbert Butterfield has put it, 'the mother of modern war...[heralding] the age when peoples, woefully ignorant of one another, bitterly uncomprehending, lie in uneasy juxtaposition, watching one another's sins with hysteria and indignation. It heralds Armageddon, the giant conflict for justice and right between angered populations, each of which thinks it is the righteous one. So a new kind of warfare is born--the modern counterpart of the old conflicts of religion.'" - Paul Johnson
"If you don't know history, you don't know anything." - Edward Johnston, Michael Crichton's Timeline
"The chief aim of the Clinton administration was to make sure that nothing terrible happened on its watch. Accordingly, every can was kicked down the road" - Charles Krauthammer
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his." - General George Patton
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason
"Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?" - Jean-Baptiste Say
"Jimmy Carter?! He's history's greatest monster!" - Someone in a crowd after a statue of Carter is unveiled, The Simpsons
"The past is many things, but one thing it is, is irrevocable. A past to your liking is not an entitlement." - Thomas Sowell
"When you consider how hard it is to get people to treat each other justly when they are face to face, seeking to produce justice between social abstractions stretching back over the centuries is a truly ambitious undertaking. " - Thomas Sowell
The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir... We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals." - Neal Stephenson
"The gods mercifully gave mankind this little moment of peace between the religious fanaticisms of the past and the fanaticisms of class and race that were speedily to arise and dominate time to come." - G. M. Trevelyan
"I am sick of all the history-ignorant motherfuckers out there. History: Learn it, you stupid asshats." - Bryan Trosko
"In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them." - Pierre Trudeau
"For the average person, all problems date to WWII; for the more informed, to WWI; for the genuine historian to the French Revolution." - Enk von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (actually, they all date back to Rousseau, the father of the French Revolution - L)
"Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics." - Ludwig von Mises
"Like so many of our other destructive tendencies, this whole mess really started in the latter part of the 1960’s." - Bill Whittle
"You tell the big lie by carefully selecting only the small, isolated truths, linking them in such a way that they advance the bigger lie by painting a picture inside the viewer’s head. The Ascended High Master of this Dark Art is Noam Chomsky." - Bill Whittle