Historical Milestones Quotes

Make history or be a part of it.

Because many advances have happened, we've lost the urgency (and that's just human nature) that we had before, when we couldn't vote, couldn't use mass transportation, or drink from the fountains.

My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

The onward march of the human race requires that the heights around it constantly blaze with noble lessons of courage. Deeds of daring dazzle history and form one of man's guiding lights.

I've been there for so many crossroads in American history. My whole political life spans the birth of the environmental movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, putting an end to unjust wars, and so and so.

I find that anything culturally significant that happened before '93 I associate with the decade before it. In fact, Oregon Trail is one of a handful of signposts that middle school existed at all.

No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time - the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountain top and pointed the way to the Promised Land. Yes we can!

I know it feels like two steps forward and one step back, but we are making progress. In my lifetime, I have lived through one World War, I have lived through the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the pulling down of the Berlin Wall. I have experienced what I never thought I would have experienced, which is a pretty workable peace in Northern Ireland, and I experienced a unified Europe - until the Conservative government got its hands on the idea that in order to appease a few back-benchers they would hold a referendum, what a disastrous idea.

Our history, in the cosmos and on planet Earth, was shaped by countless events, some obviously epic, some seemingly trivial, yet all vital in getting us to this point, here and now, the people we are today.