All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.
For history is to the nation as memory is to the individual.
The very discovery of the New world was the by-product of a dietary quest.
Man generally is entangled in insoluble problems; history is consequently a tragedy in which we are all involved, whose keynote is anxiety and frustration, not progress and fulfilment.
History is full of surprises.
Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.
Righteousness is easy in retrospect.
Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself!
There is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.
Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.
The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.
Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.
The use of history as therapy means the corruption of history as history.
I trust that a graduate student some day will write a doctoral essay on the influence of the Munich analogy on the subsequent history of the twentieth century. Perhaps in the end he will conclude that the multitude of errors committed in the name of Munich may exceed the original error of 1938.
Brave men earn the right to shape their own destiny.
History, in the end, becomes a form of irony.
I don’t think I have made as much of my life as I should have. I should have written more books.
Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values.
Anti-intellectualism has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.