The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning.

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.