History at its best is vicarious experience.

A historian should not be didactic-that is a word that makes my blood run cold.

Who would think it possible to redirect historical scholarship by explaining what Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence?

The three hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials of 1692 comes at a time when witchcraft commands a scholarly attention that would have been puzzling in 1892 or even in 1792.

The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people, ' who created the government that Americans still live under.

Learn from the past, but don’t live in the past.

My first rule of war, Cat-never give the enemy his wish

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

The loving personality seeks not to control, but to nurture, not to dominate, but to empower.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Im always terrified when Im writing.

Eternity eludes us, even as a thought.

I've never been the kind of guy to hype myself up. It's just not my thing.

He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

We talked [with Scott Derrickson] about making it kind of muscular and practical. Yeah it's a fantasy but what's the difference between fantasy and reality really?