Each generation, we peel back biases that have blinded those before us. The more we know about the past enables us to ask richer and more provocative questions about who we are today.

If we think back through our own lives, the subjects that you liked best in school almost certainly were taught by the teachers you liked best. And the teacher you liked best was the teacher who cared about the subject she taught.

It would be the most crucial day of the entire war.

Love of learning will never let you down. You can have a quest for money, you can have a quest for power, you can have a quest for fame and they are sometimes gratifying and sometimes self-destructive. The love of learning is always gratifying and never self-destructive. The more educated, the more cultivated a society becomes, better off is everybody.

There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, "What was it like when you were a kid?" I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.

You can make the argument that there's no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past. They lived in the present. It is their present, not our present, and they don't know how it's going to come out. They weren't just like we are because they lived in that very different time. You can't understand them if you don't understand how they perceived reality.

We must not think of learning as only what happens in schools. It is an extended part of life. The most readily available resource for all of life is our public library system.