"Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred..." - Quote by Henry David Thoreau

“It is said that some Western steamers can run on a heavy dew, whence we can imagine what a canoe may do.”

“I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.”

“Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.”

“Vanity is illustrated in the cause and effect of love, as in the case of Cleopatra.”

“The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality.”

“If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.”

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

“We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion, but what's important.”

“If a man says that it is right to give every one his due, and therefore thinks within his own mind that injury is due from a just man to his enemies but kindness to his friends, he was not wise who said so, for he spoke not the truth, for in no case has it appeared to be just to injure any one.”