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.

I have always been in a condition in which I cannot not write.

Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

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

Books are humanity in print.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.