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

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in any case fading.

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others – only to lose it over themselves.

Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.

The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.

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

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.

Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

Disneyworld… is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin’s, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan’s.

I think that any time you look at the fact that boycotts have historically led to change, whatever temporary inconvenience there may be, it in the long run leads toward, in my opinion, a better change for everybody.

Country & western, rap, heavy metal, with historical folk rock off in some kind of cult.

There’s room in the world for one historical folk-rock singer to make a decent living, and I happen to be it.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

This trial cannot be separated from the process of the historical struggle in Palestine that continues today between the Zionist Movement and the Palestinian people.

Historical truth is that, and that alone, which reveals the forces that go to mould the social life of mankind.

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.