We live in an era when rapid change breeds fear, and fear too often congeals us into a rigidity which we mistake for stability.

The past in the hands of historians is not what it was.

If you owe $50, you're a delinquent account. If you owe $50,000, you're a small businessmen. If you owe $50 million, you're a corporation. If you owe $50 billion, you're the government.

Knowledge Qf history frees us to be contemporary.

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

History is a means of access to ourselves.

Ibn Firnas was a polymath: a physician, a rather bad poet, the first to make glass from stones (quartz), a student of music, and inventor of some sort of metronome.