“Wisdom – meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.”

Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

The reality of a question is inevitably more complicated than we would like to suppose.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

More than a code of manners in war and love, Chivalry was a moral system, governing the whole of noble life.

The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some access and which many helped to create.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Above all, discard the irrelevant.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

The Hundred Years’ War, like the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval unity.

Books are humanity in print.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.

If you give appreciation to people, you win their goodwill. But more important than that, practicing this philosophy has made a different person of me.

A part of my appreciation for the good which moments bring has come from awareness and recognition. But it has also come from a correspnding sadness which arises from their passing.

I came from a state where 35 percent self-identify as Tea Partiers, so I’m a bit distorted perhaps in my appreciation for the larger American population.

The fanatics for progress often have too little appreciation of the existing.

A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

If you drive to, say, Shenandoah National Park, or the Great Smoky Mountains, you’ll get some appreciation for the scale and beauty of the outdoors.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.