The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood NOT as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.

Nineteenth-century grass-roots populism made twentieth-century progressivism possible.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesnt enter into it.

History is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else.

Why do beautiful women love ugly men?

Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis.

Germ theory, which secularized infectious disease, had a side effect: it sacralized epidemiology.

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; thats what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

The rule of money is it must be earned.

As most real writers do, he wrote because he had something to say, not because of any specific ambition to be a writer.

Advantage is a better soldier than rashness.

I have come to know that we learn much more of what is important when we concentrate on helping others than when we concentrate on our own challenges.

For the party, the Beijing Games are the biggest political happening of 2008. Everything revolves around them. This will be a huge celebration for the President Hu Jintao and the Premier Wen Jiabao.

Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism? You should know that this slogan, this goal, can certainly be achieved.

There are books that one needs maturity to enjoy just as there are books an adult can come on too late to savor.

Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle ofyour character and aims.

Progress of mankind is the decadence of humanity.

When I was 17, I had my first proper girlfriend, and on Valentine's Day, I painted a canvas of her, bought her a massage, put flowers on the stairs, and ran a bath.