Historical Figures Quotes
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"A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous."Source: Quoted in The Gospel According to Coco Chanel : Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman (2009) | Speaker: Coco Chanel


"All her hairSource: Porphyria's Lover | Author: Robert Browning
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around"


"And they brought us whole binders full of women."Source: 2012 Presidential Debate | Speaker: Mitt Romney

"Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."Source: My Life and Work (1923) | Author: Henry Ford

"Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible."Source: The Dalai Lama's visit to Capitol Hill | Speaker: Dalai Lama

"Billions and billions."Source: Carl Sagan | Speaker: Carl Sagan


"But it does move."Source: Unknown | Speaker: Galileo Galilei

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."Source: February 5, 2008 Speech | Speaker: Barack Obama

"Do not call for Black power or green power. Call for brain power."Source: Campus Speeches, Quoted in the Chicago Tribune | Author: Barbara Jordan

"Education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom."Source: 1896 Letter to Booker T. Washington | Author: George Washington Carver

"Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world."Source: 2003 Speech | Speaker: Nelson Mandela

"Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement."Source: Henry Ford's Marketing Team | Speaker: Henry Ford



"God doesn't play dice with the world."Source: Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man | Speaker: Albert Einstein

"Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions."Source: Unknown | Speaker: Dalai Lama

"Have a vision. Be demanding."Source: It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership | Author: Colin Powell

"Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."Source: Stanford Commencement Speech (2005) | Speaker: Steve Jobs

"Hitler didn't snub me—it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram."Source: A Republican Rally in Baltimore, Maryland | Speaker: Jesse Owens

"Hope is the thing with feathers—That perches in the soul"Source: Hope Is the Thing with Feathers | Author: Emily Dickinson

"Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful."Source: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci | Author: Leonardo da Vinci

"I believe it is peace for our time."Source: Speech outside 10 Downing Street | Speaker: Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain

"I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom."Source: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass | Author: Frederick Douglass

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy."Source: 1780 Letter | Author: John Adams

"I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters—two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women—playing with their dogs on the White House lawn."Source: 2016 Democratic National Convention Speech | Speaker: Michelle Obama

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."Source: Letter to Robert Hooke | Author: Sir Isaac Newton

"In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different."Source: Quoted in Coco Chanel: Her Life, Her Secrets (1971) | Speaker: Coco Chanel

"In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute."Source: Furman v. Georgia | Author: Thurgood Marshall

"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."Source: 1789 Letter | Author: Benjamin Franklin

"It was a dark and stormy night."Source: Paul Clifford | Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong."Source: Unknown | Speaker: Ella Fitzgerald


"Let them eat cake!"Source: Marie Antoinette | Speaker: Marie Antoinette



"No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent."Source: The annual convention of the California State Suffrage Association | Speaker: Susan B. Anthony

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."Source: 1965 TV Broadcast | Speaker: J. Robert Oppenheimer

"Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die."Source: Speech to the 23rd Republican National Convention (June 1944) | Speaker: Herbert Hoover

"Politics is the art of the possible."Source: St. Petersburgische Zeitung | Author: Prince Otto von Bismarck

"Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation."Source: My Life with Martin Luther King Jr. | Author: Coretta Scott King

"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."Source: Up from Slavery: An Autobiography | Author: Booker T. Washington

"That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."Source: The Gettysburg Address | Author: Abraham Lincoln

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."Source: The New Yorker | Author: Hannah Arendt

"The pen is mightier than the sword."Source: Richelieu | Author: Edward Bulwer-Lytton

"The President—whoever he is—has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody."Source: Farewell Address (1953) | Speaker: Harry S. Truman

"The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe! You have to make it fall."Source: Libération | Speaker: Che Guevara

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."Source: The San Francisco Chronicle | Author: Henry Ford

"War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."Source: Speech to the Mayor and Councilmen of Atlanta (1864) | Speaker: William Tecumseh Sherman


"We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice."Source: "The Celebration of Negro History Week" in The Journal of Negro History | Author: Carter G. Woodson


"You are your possibilities. If you know that, you can do anything."Source: "Building a Dream" in Oprah Magazine | Speaker: Oprah Winfrey