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.

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.

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.

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.

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

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

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