Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion of the moment.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot.

Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing.

Ah, what an awe great God!

The ball and chain of creativity has no key

Where there is darkness, let me be the light. Where there is suffering, let me be kind and compassionate.

Just surrender to the story.

She made him want to lose control, something he never did. She also made him want things he'd never imagined for his own life, like a family and someone to come home to every night.

I'd meet a new filmmaker that I'd always loved, and I'd think, "Great! I'm in the right place." It's a weird way to look at it, but I don't care as long as I'm able to make stuff that I want to make.

Great triumphs of engineering genius-the locomotive, the truss bridge, the steel rail- ... are rather invention than engineering proper.

[A writer is] a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

No one wants to go out mid-sentence.

Men have feelings too, you know. You bruise the petals of my manflower.