History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
If you live on Nantucket, you can't avoid its history, and 'Moby Dick' is the way most of us get into Nantucket's history.
Something as curious as the monarchy won't survive unless you take account of people's attitudes. After all, if people don't want it, they won't have it.
And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.
I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.
Jesus was a human being, bound by history and the natural world; an extraordinary man, to be sure, but still a man.
In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.
Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.
History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.
There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
I've always been very forward-looking, and it was actually kind of difficult to turn my gaze backwards to look at comics history.
There's something quite exciting when you have a history with somebody and you see them do new and different things.
That was a misconception among a lot of people - that Mormons are polygamist. No, they're not. I mean they obviously have that in their history, and there are some fundamentalists.
I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot.
I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.
My dad was an engineer and so I had this picture of science and technology and pursuits of the mind as being more impressive than artistic pursuits, which I saw a as kind of frivolous.
I've learnt something from every failure. The products I helped design at the first two companies I worked for were utter failures. But now I know why.
You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.
Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.
I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'
The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.
