Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history..

Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that's the most important thing..

Though [Abraham Lincoln] never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to Merry England; he went with Lord Byron poetry to Spain and….

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image..

What I learned, more than anything, was that you can't have it all balanced perfectly at any one time. When I was young, it was much more balanced to….

Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his cou….

I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they're never going to work out successfully in the end….

What the American Dream means to me is the fact that - what founded this country - when I think about those posters that were put up in Europe, which….

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it..

I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from th….

If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated.….

I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build t….

If your ambition comes at the price of an unbalanced life, that there's nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it's not worth it..

When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that ….

As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question..

Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation..

Better to have your enemies inside your tent pissing out, then to have them outside your tent pissing in..

I still think about that one Jamiroquai video a lot..

That is what leadership is all about: staking your ground ahead of where opinion is and convincing people, not simply following the popular opinion o….

The one thing that John Kennedy did, above all else, was to energize young people to feel that they wanted to give something to their country. I just….

What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something….