There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who alphabetize their record collections, and the kind who don't.

The true American patriot is by definition skeptical of the government.

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

The only thing more dangerous than an idea is a belief.

I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.