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

Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.

What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. If you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.

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

I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him.

He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.