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

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

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.

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

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