The more we see the founders as humans the more we can understand them.

You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

Your education never stops and college is just the beginning. You come out of college with a huge advantage in that you've ideally and more times than not you've come out with a love of learning and that's what matters above all.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

The preparations were elaborate and mammoth in scale, and Washington threw himself into the effort, demanding that not an hour be lost.