My strong feeling is that we must learn more about how we learn. I’m convinced that we learn by struggling to find the solution to a problem on our own with some guidance, but getting in and getting our hands dirty and working it.
I would pay to do what I do if I had to.
I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.
I love all sides of the work but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard.
There is a human longing to go back to other times. We all know how when we were children we asked our parents, “What was it like when you were a kid?” I think it probably has something to do with our survival as a species.
I think that we need history as much as we need bread or water or love.
Nobody ever lived in the past.
Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was no enough that a leader look the part; by Washington’s rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision.
Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.
There is only one person who can measure your success. That person is you.
He had kept his head, kept his health and his strength, bearing up under a weight of work and worry that only a few could have carried.
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. – John Adams.
Napoleon could never imagine that some people loved their country as much as he loved his own.
Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.
You can’t be a full participant in our democracy if you don’t know our history.
I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research.
You have to have wisdom and knowledge as well as virtue to preserve your rights and liberties.
First of all, you can make the argument that there’s no such thing as the past. Nobody lived in the past.
I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word – for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals.
The past after all is only another name for someone else’s present.