Above all, discard the irrelevant.

The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

Human behavior is timeless.

It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around.... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

To put away one's own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.