Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

One enjoys the good things more to the extent that one goes to them after having labored in advance, for labors are a sauce for good things

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

They walked off down the hall in the direction of a sign that said Colored Waiting Room. Billie guessed white folks didn't have to wait.

War is sometimes described as long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of excitement. History is often similar, if rather safer.

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

Only one president in this book was a supervillain. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Chester A. Arthur, the Lex Luthor of the American Presidency.

Historical reality has two sides. One is made ​​up of facts, events, material realities, and one of the ideas, images and dreams.

Far from being marginalized, as is presently the case, nineteenth-century freethought was a social movement at the core of our national life.

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

History will not let us forget: it wears disguises, reintroduces itself to us, claims it is someone new and wonderful. But let us not forget.

She probably thought I was making a dumb joke, but sometimes history sounded like a dumb joke. History was either a dumb joke or a cruel joke.