“I guess it will always be that way until the Church learns how to take lessons from culture and from history, and stops… putting labels of "spiritual" and "unspiritual" on things which God never labeled. -Appalachian Melody.”

As quoted in an interview with Marc Blau (2004) http://www.celebratestadium.com/blogz/2006/04/stadium-olympics-hollywood.html
Context: I guess the one thing I really learned from participating in sports was to just never say "no", never stop trying, and to always believe that you can do better than the next fellow. I tried to follow this throughout my life, but I always tried to be respectful about it.

Interview with Oded Fehr http://www.somethingjewish.co.uk/articles/69_interview_with_oded_.htm (2001)

Oprah's commencement speech at Howard University (12 May 2007) http://www.graduationwisdom.com/speeches/0024-winfrey.htm

Source: Street Lethal (1983), Chapter 16 “Warrior” (p. 239)

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), p. 34

Introduction, as translated by H. B. Nisbet (1975)
Variant translation: What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Pragmatical (didactic) reflections, though in their nature decidedly abstract, are truly and indefeasibly of the Present, and quicken the annals of the dead Past with the life of to-day. Whether, indeed, such reflections are truly interesting and enlivening, depends on the writer's own spirit. Moral reflections must here be specially noticed, the moral teaching expected from history; which latter has not unfrequently been treated with a direct view to the former. It may be allowed that examples of virtue elevate the soul, and are applicable in the moral instruction of children for impressing excellence upon their minds. But the destinies of peoples and states, their interests, relations, and the complicated tissue of their affairs, present quite another field. Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present.
Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 6 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Source: Queer Notions, A Fabulous Collection of Gay and Lesbian Wit and Wisdom, 1996, p. 18.

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 4.