Favorite Historical Quotes

[The Zoo Boy]

We have a bunch of quote games in this forum, but suprisingly, not one like this. Post some history folks!!!

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
-Hassan-i Sabbāh, founder and leader of the Hashshashin Assassin Order, on his death bed (1124)

"I did not tell half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed."
-Marco Polo, on his death bed (January 9, 1324)

"If I were to write the story of my life, I would shock the world."
-Caterina Sforza, confiding to a monk in the final years of her life

"One ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting."
-Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 15 (1513)

"Before all else, be armed."
-Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, The Prince (1513)

"Our life is made by the death of others."
-Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

"There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory."
-Sir Francis Drake, in a letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, from off Cape Sagres, Portugal (May 17, 1587)

"Remember that time is money.
-Benjamin Franklin, Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748)

"I always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous!" God granted it."
-François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), in a letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville (May 16, 1767)

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did."
-T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), introductory chapter of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

[BLOWHARD]

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Aleister Crowley

Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem.
Joseph Stalin

One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
Napoleon Bonaparte

It's up to history to judge.
Pol Pot

Filipinos want beauty. I have to look beautiful so that the poor Filipinos will have a star to look at from their slums.
Imelda Marcos

People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I earned everything I've got.
Richard M. Nixon

Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy
Mao Tse-Tung

Greed is all right, by the way I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.
Ivan F. Boesky

It is legal because I wish it.
Louis XIV

Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu

Justice is incidental to law and order.
J. Edgar Hoover

And, of course, those quotes mean nothing without the back story!

[Stellazira]

"You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life."
- Winston Churchill

[The Zoo Boy]

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die."
-George Washington, in an address to the Continental Army before the Battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776)