Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question.

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in.

all through my childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, allowing me to believe that without my personal renderings of all those games he missed while he was at work, he would be unable to follow our team in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever incomplete.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Sometimes people will find things that are wrong. Sometimes they will even find an approach that you took wrong. If you think you took the right approach, then you just absorb the criticism, but you don't change your mind.

An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.