I feel that history is in many ways the most important of all subjects because it is about everything and because it's about who we are and how we came to be the way we are.

Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was no enough that a leader look the part; by Washington's rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision.

Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.

In time I began to understand that it's when you start writing that you really find out what you don't know and need to know.

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love.

One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.