“An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one’s own prose.”

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 They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.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.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

The family is the essential presence, the thing that never leaves you, even if you find you have to leave it.

We face an essential need to reach a definition of terrorism that will enjoy wide international agreement, thus enabling international operations against terrorist organizations.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

There is nothing more guaranteed to reduce a man to the essentials than to live beneath the sky.

The essential thing is to run period! And to do it for a long time and consistently and then everything will take care of itself.

For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.

To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.

I assure this committee that, if I am confirmed, I will be strictly independent of all political influences… essential to that institution’s ability to function effectively and achieve its mandated objectives.