The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context

The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.

Change is certain. Progress is not.

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks the question: Whither?

It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceded everywhere pari passu with the nationalization of industry.

Good historians...have the future in their bones

We are going to make mistakes no matter what, so it's better to be strong in faith despite our mistakes than weak in faith because of them.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

How has retirement affected my golf game? A lot more people beat me now.

If you've never seen an elephant ski, then you've never been on acid.

The Supreme Court must serve as an independent check on abuses by the executive branch and the protector of our liberties, not a cheerleader for an imperial presidency.

Sometimes even when the book is over I dont know whos good and whos bad. Its really more interesting, I think, to write about gray characters than it is to write about black and white.

Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, "I won't be a mom anymore." It gutted me pretty badly.

. . . the mind is desperate to fix the river {of events} in place: Possessed by ideas of the past, preoccupied with images of the future, it overlooks the plain truth of the moment.

I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS.

There are more facts and more truths told in the first eight minutes of The Daily Show than most political news conferences in Washington.