I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

I feel that as much as I enjoy loafing, there is something higher for which to live.

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. None. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background.

I want people to see that all-important time in a different way-in the way it was. For of a number of reasons, including the absence of photographs, we tend to see the men and women of the Revolution as not quite real. And we have far too little sense of what they suffered.

Washington was a man of exceptional, almost excessive self-command, rarely permitting himself any show of discouragement or despair.

Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, 'Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually.