shook the world
“Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there.” – Paul Kruger, 1902
“The only white race that has steadily been going backwards to barbarism.” – Sir Garnet Wolseley comments on the Boers during the Anglo-Boer South African War
“E=mc2” (Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) – Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity
“Had we lived I would have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our bodies must tell the tale.” – Captain Robert Falcon Scott, from the diary of his trip to the Antarctic, 1911
“If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.”
– Rupert Brooke, The Soldier, 1914
“What passing bells for those who die like cattle?” – World War I poet and combatant Wilfred Owen
“Ten days that shook the world” – The title of John Reed’s first-hand account of the Bolshevik revolution
“Communism is Soviet government plus the electrification of the whole country.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1920
“We fight for the land and not for illusions that give us nothing to eat … with or without elections, the people are chewing the cud of bitterness.” – Emiliano Zapata, Mexican revolutionary leader, 1918
“You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.” – Joseph Stalin
“There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all people are equal.” – American industrialist Henry Ford
“One can relish the varied idiocy of human action during a panic to the full, for, while it is a time of great tragedy, nothing is being lost but money.” – John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” – Franklin D Roosevelt, speech accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency, July 2 1932
“The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1933
“We have buried the putrid corpse of liberty.” – Benito Mussolini, 1934
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin
“There was a time when only the dead could smile.” – Anna Akhmatova, 1935
“In Germany, they came first for the communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.” – Martin Niemoeller
“Treacherous generals: look at my dead house. Look at broken Spain.” – Pablo Neruda
“Is that a gun in your pocket or are you glad to see me?” – Mae West
“I believe it is peace for our time … Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.” – British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, after returning from the Munich conference with Adolf Hitler, September 30 1938
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.” – Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons after the fall of Dunkirk, June 4 1940
“Since those whose duty it was to hold the sword of France have let it fall, I have picked up its broken point.” – Charles de Gaulle, July 13 1940
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” – Churchill, tribute to the Royal Air Force, House of Commons, August 20 1940
“We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” – Roosevelt, December 29 1940
“Here’s looking at you, kid.” – Humphrey Bogart, spoken as Rick in Casablanca, 1941.
“I shall return.” – General Douglas McArthur, on leaving Corregidor for Australia, 1941.
“Is Paris burning?” – Hitler, August 25 1944
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” – Anne Frank
“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and the worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small … And for these ends to practise tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours … Have resolved to combine these efforts to accomplish our aims.” – Preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, June 1945
“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima … The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.” – US President Harry Truman, August 6 1945
“There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky. Mr Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills. It seemed a sheet of sun. Both he and Mr Matsuo reacted in terror … Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.” – John Hersey, Hiroshima, 1946
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” – Churchill, speech at Fulton, Missouri, March 5 1946
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” – George Orwell, from Animal Farm, 1945
“I never forget a face but in your case I’ll make an exception.” – Groucho Marx
“Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.” – Alan Paton, on the land, from Cry the Beloved Country
“The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is the best after all.” – Dr Benjamin Spock
“Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” – Louis Armstrong, reply on being asked what jazz is
“There is no god higher than truth.” – Mohandas Gandhi
“Every communist must grasp the truth: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” – Mao Tse-tung
“The people are like water and the army is like fish.” – Mao, 1948
“I shall never believe that God plays dice with the universe.” – Einstein.
“If men cease to believe they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.” – Henry Miller
“Gentlemen always seem to prefer blondes.” – Anita Loos
“I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.” – Pablo Picasso, 1952
“Excuse my dust.” – Epitaph on the grave of Dorothy Parker, suggested by herself.
“There is no place for the native in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” – South African Prime Minister HF Verwoerd
“If we are to remain free, if we are to enjoy the full benefits of Africa’s enormous wealth, we must unite to plan for the full exploitation of our human and material resources, in the interest of all our people.” – Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, 1957 to 1966
“Live fast, die young, and leave a good- looking corpse.” – James Dean
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas
“One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
“What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce Conquistadors … They carried everything off and left us everything … They left us the words.” – Pablo Neruda
“This island will sink in the ocean before we consent to be anybody’s slaves.” – Fidel Castro
“I want to be alone.” – Greta Garbo
“It was as though in those last minutes he (Eichman) was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil.” – Hannah Arendt
“Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.” – John Wayne, advice on acting
“And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” – John F Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20 1961
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” – Decca Recording Company, rejecting the Beatles, 1962
“Here is a tree rooted in African soil, nourished with waters from the rivers of Africa. Come and sit under its shade and become, with us, the leaves of the same branch and the same tree.” – Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, founder of the Pan Africanist Congress
“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” – Nelson Mandela, speech from the dock at Rivonia, 1964
“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, 1964
“They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work.” – Soviet factory saying
“When she stopped conforming to the conventional picture of femininity, she finally began to enjoy being a woman.” – Betty Friedan
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave- owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, at civil rights march, August 28 1963
“Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.” – James Brown, title of song, 1968
“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” – Muhammad Ali
“My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the stone age.” – US General Curtis Le May
“Power is the great aphro- disiac” -Henry Kissinger
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong, on first stepping on the moon, July 20 1969
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” – Richard Nixon
“The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.” – Steven Biko
“It leaves me cold.” – Police Minster Jimmy Kruger’s feelings on the murder of Biko, National Party congress, 1977
“We have to adapt or die.” – PW Botha’s Upington speech, 1978
“Peace is much more precious than a piece of land.” – Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat, Cairo, March 8 1978
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” – Czech writer Milan Kundera
“We spoke and acted as if, given the opportunity for self- government, we would quickly create utopias. Instead injustice, even tyranny, is rampant.” – Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere
“History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.” – Economist Milton Friedman
“Man is dead but his spirit still lives.” – Chant of factory workers who marched through the streets of Durban, 1973
“I’m not going and they’re not throwing me out.” – Nicaraguan dictator Anastasia Somoza, weeks before he was ousted by the Sandinistas, 1979
“Together, hand-in-hand with our sticks and matches, with our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” – Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, 1986
“We cannot and should not allow a situation of relative peace and tranquility to obtain in the white areas of the country while black townships are in flames. We must take the struggle into the white areas of South Africa and there attack the apartheid regime and its forces of repression.” – Oliver Tambo, 1986
“One settler, one bullet.” – Azanian People’s Liberation Army slogan
“Our underbelly has been ripped open.” – Tokyo Sexwale, on the murder of Chris Hani, 1993
“The moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked’ – when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust seems then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.” – Vaclev Havel, Power of the Powerless
“Poland, Ten Years. Hungary, Ten Months. East Germany, Ten Weeks. Czekoslovakia, Ten Days.”
– Prague graffito, December 1989
“It’s a miracle that the ANC broke so few eggs to make such a large omelette for South Africa.” – Mathews Phosa
“We enter into a covenant that we shall build a society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” – Mandela, inaugural speech from the Union Buildings, May 10 1994
“Four versions … four … exist of the life of Christ. Which one would you have liked to chuck out?” – Truth commission chair Archbishop Desmond Tutu after political parties submitted differing versions of history
“Things went horribly wrong.” – Madikizela-Mandela, after nine days of TRC hearings, December 4 1997
“I’m not going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time.” – US President Bill Clinton at a White House news conference in January 1998
“It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” – Woody Allen
“I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons … I know that none dare challenge me when I say I am an African.” – President Thabo Mbeki
“I am nearing my end. I want to sleep till eternity with a smile on my face.” – Mandela