My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

I think the very best thing about the internet is that I can read all the London papers every day if I want to.

A samurai must remain calm at all times even in the face of danger.

He who gives only what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice.

I just realized how long it was since the last album, and where did the time go? You know?

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today. With organic farming we could only feed four billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die?

There is no fence or hedge round time that has gone. You can go back and have what you like if you remember it well enough.

Running a football team is no different than running any other kind of organization.

It's human nature to find patterns where there are none and to find skill where luck is a more likely explanation (particularly if you're the lucky manager).