Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world.

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

I don't much mind being expelled from communities.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

American social arrangements, economic arrangements, the degree of inequality in American life, the relatively small role played by the government in American public life and so forth, compares to exactly the opposite conditions in most of the European societies.

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have