It is difficult to find a reputable American historian who will acknowledge the crude fact that a Franklin Roosevelt, say, wanted to be President merely to wield power, to be famed and to be feared. To learn this simple fact one must wade through a sea of evasions: history as sociology, leaders as teachers, bland benevolence as a motive force, when, finally, power is an end to itself, and the instinctive urge to prevail the most important single human trait, the necessary force without which no city was built, no city destroyed.

No reform ever came from the bottom, and it was always people who understood how the ruling class worked who turned out to be the reformers.

Nothing human is finally calculable; even to ourselves we are strange.

At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

People in my situation get to read about themselves whether they want to or not. It's generally wrong. Or oversimplified - which is sometimes useful.

Ronald Reagan: a triumph of the embalmer's art.

By and large, serious fiction was the work of victims who portrayed victims for an audience of victims who, it was oddly assumed, would want to see their lives realistically portrayed.