If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.