in the midst of war and crisis nothing is as clear or as certain as it appears in hindsight

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

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement.

Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.