James Baldwin on history

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex. You thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes.

Adolf Hitler1889–1945

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

Harry S. Truman1884–1972