To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.

Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.