“An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting.”

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

Lovers of the town have been content, for the most part, to say they loved it. They do not brag about its uplifting qualities. They have none of the infernal smugness which makes the lover of the country insupportable.

The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.

What strange impulse is it which induces otherwise truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus expose themselves to hours of boredom?

Every true American likes to think in terms of thousands and millions. The word ‘million’ is probably the most pleasure-giving vocable in the language.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge … falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.

Woman is quick to revere genius, but in her secret soul she seldom loves it.

The friendships of nations, built on common interests, cannot survive the mutability of those interests.

It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

whereas the dog strives to lessen the distance between himself and man, seeks ever to be intelligent and intelligible, and translates into looks and actions the words he cannot speak, the cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

Need drives men to envy as fullness drives them to selfishness.

Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature.

The search for the truth for truth’s sake is the mark of the historian.

It has been important to me, as an historian of photography, to understand photography by photographing.

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship.

That means there’s also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.

And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.

Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?