I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.

Never assume that people in positions of responsibility are behaving responsibly.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

Books can change your life. Some of the most influential people in our lives are characters we meet in books.

My wife, the star I steer by.

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.

Awake my great strength.

The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

I look at Jerusalem as being a beacon for the three monotheistic religions.

The triumph of an uncluttered mind.

Bring out the nature of the materials. Let their nature intimately into your scheme.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

A voyage without companionship, that is to say without conversation, is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

Poetry affords us a respite in which we may gather renewed strength for the old struggle to adapt ourselves to reality.

I think it's a very important function of art to challenge accepted reality, especially when that reality is created by powerful interest groups.