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The supreme, the merciless, the destroyer of opposition, the exalted King, the shepherd, the protector of the quarters of the world, the King the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced mighty and merciless Kings from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same to acknowledge one supremacy.

History is fond of her grandchildren, for it offers them the marrow of the bones, which the previous generation had hurt its hands in breaking.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

One of the lessons of history is that 'nothing' is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

What is all our histories, but God showing himself, shaking and trampling on everything that he has not planted.

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?

What most impresses us about great jurists is not their tenacious grasps of fine points, honed almost to invisibility; it is the moment when we are suddently aware of the sweep and direction of the law, and its place in the lives of men.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture -- in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

I once asked my history teacher how we were expected to learn anything useful from his subject, when it seemed to me to be nothing but a monotonous and sordid succession of robber baron scumbags devoid of any admirable human qualities. I failed history.

Failure is impossible.

Fear of serious injury alone cannot justify oppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

They died hard, those savage men-like wounded wolves at bay. They were filthy, and they were lousy, and they stunk. And I loved them.

We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world -- or the last.

The men who make history have not time to write it.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Might does not make right, it only makes history.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?