When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

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

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.

The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.

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.

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.

If you get down about the state of American culture, just remember there are still more public libraries in this country than there are McDonalds.