International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

Am I not a man and brother?

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

We see the world as less random than it actually is.

Alliances and international organizations should be understood as opportunities for leadership and a means to expand our influence, not as constraints on our power.

Endless praise and adoration, limitless abnegation and abjection of self; a celestial North Korea.

Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.

Solitude causes us to write because it causes us to think.

For when we talk about the spreading power and influence of globalization, arent we really referring to the spreading economic and military might of the US?

In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill; whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.

Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

You can always change you plan, but only if you have one.

When we're infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness ... it changes what we see. It changes what we remember.