Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.

As the CIA and KGB, like God and Satan, fight Miltonic battles across five continents.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

This book is dedicated to the people of America--strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.

The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them. A young writer must cross many psychological barriers to acquire confidence in his capacity to produce good work-especially his first full-length book-and he cannot do this by staring at a piece of blank paper, searching for the perfect sentence.

Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye.

If the decline of Christianity created the modern political zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluating evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped.