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.

satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of reality.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

When people don't have an objective, there's much less dynamic effort, and that makes life a lot less interesting.

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.