We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

At eighty things do not occur; they recur.

History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion. You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom. You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.