“Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.”

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)
Context: I began gradually to perceive this immense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history to look out for and read for—if he has not found it—it was that the kings of England all the way from the Norman Conquest down to the times of Charles I. had appointed, so far as they knew, those who deserved to be appointed, peers. They were all Royal men, with minds full of justice and valour and humanity, and all kinds of qualities that are good for men to have who ought to rule over others. Then their genealogy was remarkable—and there is a great deal more in genealogies than is generally believed at present. I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that it goes for a great deal—the hereditary principle in Government as in other things; and it must be recognised so soon as there is any fixity in things.

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Rahul Gandhi: India is going to be 21st century Saudi Arabia, Rahul Gandhi http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YOZOM0lROs

Source: For One More Day

As cited in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 441

"Blood and Oil," The Economist (March 4, 2000), p. 68

Statement of H.E. Mr. Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq, on the Iraq-Iranian conflict (1981)

The World Set Free (1914)
Context: Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.

Chi ni hatarakeba kado ga tatsu. Jō ni saosaseba nagasareru. Iji o tōseba kyūkutsu da. Tokaku ni hito no yo wa suminikui.
草枕 Kusamakura, 1906.