The mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts.