“Newt Gingrich seldom misses a chance to note that he is a historian.”

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

Mussolini, in 1935, went and then in the next year, conquered Ethiopia, acquiring himself a colony.

In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.

The Messerschmitt 109 fighter plane for example, the Stuka dive bomber, the 88 millimeter artillery piece, which could be used both for antiaircraft purposes and also shelling on the ground.

No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.

I think writers can respond by writing about the refugee crisis, by looking at problems faced by migrants, by trying hard to portray them as the human beings that they are.

And he learned a great deal from it about the strengths and weaknesses of these different weapons.

Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

If your real wages are declining, your job is at risk, you fear your children will be worse off than you are

Compared with how we’ve ducked it in the United States, Canada should be really proud of how you have welcomed a significant number of refugees – far more, in fact, than we Americans have, even though our population is vastly larger.

Someday, I have no doubt, the dead from today’s wars will be seen with a similar sense of sorrow at needless loss and folly as those millions of men who lie in the cemeteries of France and Belgium

Work is hard. Distractions are plentiful. And time is short.

And American soldiers were the victims of these things in Spain, American volunteers. So this war was really a testing ground for Hitler.

I think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.

It’s not everyday you get to do a pirate movie, you might as well go for it.

My parents taught me a long time ago that you win in life with people, and that’s important, because if you hang with winners, you stand a great chance of being a winner.

The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.

Unless you have prepared yourself to profit by your chance, the opportunity will only make you ridiculous. A great occasion is valuable to you just in proportion as you have educated yourself to make use of it.

Do not give the devil a chance to work on you.

One difficulty follows another very fast – but God reigns, not chance.

You’ve never gone too far that God can’t redeem you, restore you, forgive you, and give you a second chance.

The darkness doesn’t stand a chance against the sun.