532 Quotes About Biography

Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

Always do what you're afraid to do"-Robert F. Kennedy

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.

Standing quietly in the shade of the literary giant Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna is often erased from the historical record.

I devoutly hope that we will never again have to see such scenes as these. I think and hope, pray that humanity will learn more than we ... learned up to that time. But these people [allied soldiers during D-Day in Normandy] gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have done before.

In a televised appearance in June, Goldwater made remarks that permitted viewers to infer that he would look favorably on a proposal that had appeared in an Air Force journal calling for the use of low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate the Ho Chi Minh Trail, thereby exposing the North Vietnamese and their supply convoys to attack.

He [John Eisenhower] followed up by presenting me with Eugene Davidson's The Trial of the Germans, a searching and exhaustive account of the Nuremberg trials complete with in-depth profiles of the Nazi defendants. Like the Bible I had received at age ten, The Trial of the Germans was one of the most treasured gifts I had

Johnson phoned Eisenhower often ... He wanted the comfort of communicating with someone who could comprehend the unique pressures of the presidency.