Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already ….

Books are humanity in print..

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas….

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death..

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement..

War is the unfolding of miscalculations..

The nastiness of women [in the 14th century] was generally perceived at the close of life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire….

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, ….

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves..

In the midst of events there is no perspective..

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation i….

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to….

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? .….

The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century..

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten..

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that ….

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish..

The Church [in the 14th century] gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had s….

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditiona….

Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability..

We seem to be afflicted by a widespread and eroding reluctance to take any stand on any values, moral, behavioral or esthetic..