If active or concerned citizens forfeit politics, they thereby abandon their society to its most mediocre and venal public servants

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

After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.

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

Yugoslavia served as a reminder that the lessons of World War Two were only partially learned. There's a great line someone wrote in the middle of the 1990s, at the time when Clinton was agonizing about whether or not to go into Bosnia: "Everyone says, 'Never again. Never again.' But all they really mean is never again will Germans kill Jews in the streets of Warsaw".

Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life.

Although the United States lost a quarter of a million men and women, civilians and soldiers, in World War II, that's considerably less than the Russians lost in soldiers at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. It's important to convey to countries and to people and to generations who have no experience of the 20th century as it was lived in Europe just how catastrophic it was.