“Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.”

“History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.”

“The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?”

“Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.”

“Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.”

“mass indoctrination of uneducated young men with such ideas is in itself a lethal danger to society and to international order.”

“It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.”