I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.

Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

Place has always been important to me, and one thing today's Chicago exudes, as it did in 1893, is a sense of place. I fell in love with the city, the people I encountered, and above all the lake and its moods, which shift so readily from season to season, day to day, even hour to hour.

. . . why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow.

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Hitler was such an anomalous character - he was so over-the-top chaotic in his approach to statesmanship, his manner and in the violence which overwhelmed the country initially. I think diplomats around the world... felt like something like that simply would not be tolerated by the people of Germany.