Art is about forgetting all these feelings, good and bad, and trying to understand what acts will last longer, which symbols will remain in history. It's a question of perspective: The further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems.
Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.
Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
McNamara's plea was that he had no idea that Vietnam had a history of longing for self-determination, a history of resisting foreign invasion.
What don't I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain't nobody here saying, 'You'd better learn this.' But I still think I've got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
When the mayor of Sao Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn't a dramatic hike - just nine cents - but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight.
I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.
I like to be buttoned onto tradition. The thing is to improve it, twist it and mold it; to make something new of it; not to deny it. The riches of history can be plucked at any point.
Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.
In truth, the legacy that President Obama's agenda will leave on history is the poisoning of the tree of liberty.
It is a fact that the Left routinely resists, then as now: Americans fought and died in Vietnam for freedom, just as they are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Whatever mistakes generals and policymakers have made along the way cannot detract from that essential truth - which should be a part of any reliable history.
'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.
History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
What destroyed the Republican Party isn't Trump. It's the obedience to Trump from servile leaders like McConnell and Ryan who could have put a check on him. They have gotten their place in political history. They'll be remembered as vile.
The way I work: I pick a country. I learn the political history - I mean I really learn it; I read until it sinks in. Once I read the political history, I can project and find the clandestine history. And then I people it with the characters.
The 2004 Election marks the first time in modern political history that Republican voter turnout matched Democratic turnout in a presidential election year.
Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics.
I became a prime minister within four-and-a-half years, the shortest kind of career ever in Israeli political history.
It's unbelievable, there's a book out attacking Gore, when he's the most unfortunate loser in political history.
