Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed: - history treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Time after time, history ran over the luddites and romanticists, those who sought to restore the old and delay the new. And every time, history did it with faster, more reliable and more advanced vehicles.

I really love retail history. We started our first Supercenter in 1988, prior to that we were operating general merchandise discount stores, and we tried some big hypermarkets copied from Europe and they had failed miserably, but we tried to downsize it and make it a Supercenter and it started working.

Many of the ugly pages of American history have been obscured and forgotten. A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low.