I'm not sure I've learned anything new about life; but I've had to think harder about death and what comes after for other people.

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.

Reality is a powerful solvent.

We are not merely historians but also and always citizens.

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.

Today, neither Left nor Right can find their footing.

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".