“A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.”

“A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.”

“Accepting money from the federal government to conduct research places academic inquiry in the service of national interests.”

“An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.”

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.”

“As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.”

“Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.”

“Democracy is difficult and demanding. So is history. It can crack your voice; it can stir your soul; it can break your heart.”

“Desktop computers - boxes inside boxes - began appearing in those cubicles in the mid-eighties, electrical cords curling on the floor like so many ropes.”

“Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.”

“'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.”

“'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.”

“'Doctor Who' is, unavoidably, a product of mid-twentieth-century debates about Britain's role in the world as its empire unravelled.”

“Few American presidents have been unhappier or lonelier in office than Woodrow Wilson.”

“Fox News's coverage of 9/11 and the war in Iraq improved its ratings, demonstrated its influence, and intensified the controversy over its practices.”

“History is only written from what remains.”

“History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.”

“I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.”

“I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.”

“If you know a lot about something and apply that information to a vote that matches your policy preferences, your opinion quality is high.”

“In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.”

“In antihistory, time is an illusion.”

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

“In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps - college students and new graduates - to do what little was left of the work of the employees they'd laid off.”

“In the nineteen-thirties, one in four Americans got their news from William Randolph Hearst, who lived in a castle and owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities.”

“In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.”

“It feels silly to watch endless hours of winter sports every four years, when we never watch them any other time, and we don't even understand the rules, which doesn't stop us from scoring everyone, every run, every skate, every race.”

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

“Mainly, the more faddish and newer stages of life are really just marketing schemes. Tweenhood. The young old. The quarter-life crisis. You can sell a lot of junk to a lot of people by inventing a stage of life and giving it a name.”

“Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.”

“My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.”

“My mother liked to command me to do things I found scary. I always wanted to stay home and read. My mother only ever wanted me to get away.”

“My mother married my father in 1956. She was twenty-eight, and he was thirty-one. She loved him with a fierce steadiness borne of loyalty, determination, and an unyielding dignity.”

“No nation has a single history, no people a single song.”

“Not long before my mother died, I found a long-lost portrait of Jane Franklin's granddaughter, Jane Flagg, aged nine - oil on canvas - in the basement of a public library not a dozen miles from my mother's house.”

“One day, I was playing 'The Game of Life,' the board game, with a mess of kids, and I wasn't quite sure how, but it seemed different than the game I remembered playing as a kid. So I bought an old game, from 1960, and it was different.”

“One thing that always frustrated me was that, while Benjamin Franklin's was the best-known face of the eighteenth century, no one ever took his sister's likeness.”

“Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.”

“Presidential biography is, by its nature, out of scale; no character is bigger, no action greater, than the person and the doings of the American president.”

“Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.”

“Secret government programs that pry into people's private affairs are bound up with ideas about secrecy and privacy that arose during the process by which the mysterious became secular.”

“Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.”

“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more.”

“The idea of progress - the notion that human history is the history of human betterment - dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War.”

“The Karen Ann Quinlan case is where the right to life and the right to die got bound together, and I don't think they've ever gotten untangled.”

“The Olympics is an imperfect interregnum, the parade of nations a fantasy about a peace never won. It offers little relief from strife and no harbor from terror.”

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

“Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.”

“Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.”

“Well-reported news is a public good; bad news is bad for everyone.”

“When business became big business - conglomerates employing hundreds and even thousands of people - companies divided themselves into still smaller units.”

“When I was a kid, I used to deliver the newspaper all over town, cramming papers between screen doors and into mailboxes and under doormats.”