You have to know what people have been through to understand what people want and what they don't want. That's the nub of it. And what people have been through is what we call history.

Read history. By all means read history. We are all where we are, each of us, because others helped.

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

Remove yourself, sir!

The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists in an expansion of the experience of being alive, which, indeed, is what education is largely about.

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)