History always happens to us and nothing ever stays the same.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

If we have learned nothing else from the 20th century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences. Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.

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.

All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.

I've lost count of the interviews I've done about my illness and its relationship to my ideas and writing.