“History is the memory of States.”

Postcolonial countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial.

Woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning, Bismarck had cautioned.

Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world

Americans hold that every problem has a solution; Chinese think that each solution is an admission ticket to a new set of problems.

We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

Americans have a tendency to believe that when there’s a problem there must be a solution.

For Roosevelt, if a nation was unable or unwilling to act to defend its own interests, it could not expect others to respect them. Inevitably,

If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere.

Don’t be too ambitious. Do the most important thing you can think of doing every year and then your career will take care of itself.

Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.

If Chinese exceptionalism represented the claims of a universal empire, Japanese exceptionalism sprang from the insecurities of an island nation borrowing heavily from its neighbor, but fearful of being dominated by it.

The issues are too important to be left for the voters.

A diamond is a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.

Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

History: A distillation of rumor.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Religion is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

It’s very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing. If you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you’ve got it half-made. I mean intellectually.