“We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)”

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance”

“Facts are our friends. The longer we as a society insist on ignoring them when they get too uncomfortable, the more we erode our potential to be truly great.”

“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).”

“I don't see how the study of language and literature can be separated from the question of free speech, which we all know is fundamental to our society. [p.92]”

“The frame, the definition, is a type of context. And context, as we said before, determines the meaning of things. There is no such thing as the view from nowhere, or from everywhere for that matter. Our point of view biases our observation, consciously and unconsciously. You cannot understand the view without the point of view.”