It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.

The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.

Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.

To think and to be fully alive are the same.

Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.