Rand Paul Quotes

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

Either 'Deuce Coupe' has aged badly, or I have. I suspect it's the latter.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.

I didn't think I'd be around 30 years later.

Some say that now that 50 years have passed, we would like another 50 more years to celebrate once again; that means it will be 100 years. After one hundred years, I will be 118 years old.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

How could you be a Great Man if history brought you no Great Events, or brought you to them at the wrong time, too young, too old?

The matter does not appear to me now as it has appears to have appeared to me then.

I read some books, and I thought, 'This is better than sliced bread!' and a month later, I couldn't remember thinking about it. And I've read others that were kind of a slog, and I've put them down and come back six months later thinking, 'Wow, this is great.' So, you know, things change all the time.

In my time, Mother's Day wasn't celebrated the way it is now. In fact, there used to be no Mother's Day for a long time.

Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

As you get older you start to see these events and leaders, and movements of the pendulum swinging back.

The avalanche of time sweeps everything before it. Every individual instant hurtles into oblivion, drowning out the obliteration of the instant immediately preceding it, and then it too disappears under the onslaught of the next and the next and the next. When the avalanche has shuddered past for a long enough time, the perception of the past evolves. Distant events grow beyond mere history and take on the weight of legend.

I've only been gone a week," I reminded him. Well, a week's a long time. It's seven days. Which is one hundred and sixty-eight hours. Which is ten thousand, eighty minutes. Which is six hundred thousand, for hundred seconds.

I came in 11 years ago. I remember it like it was tomorrow

But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long.

Reform is a process, and not an event.

If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it's not a problem. Maybe it's a fact.

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.

Like twentieth-century Iran, the remnant of the Persian Empire, Ethiopia under Haile Selassie attempted to preserve the absolutist state throught an accommodation with modernizing forces in his own terms without completely subduing traditionalists. This was not a strategy of Haile Selassie's own choosing. Instead, he was overtaken by events and forced to deal with contradictions that were from the very beginning too formidable to be managed in the long term.

Our past has gone into history.

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

I changed it. I had to. Do you know why?" She studied him, her eyes grave. "Because that was then and this is now. Because the past is gone, even though it defines the present.

For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice.