“The belle is a product of the Deep South, which is a product of the nineteenth century and the Age of Romanticism. Virginia is a product of the eighteenth century. It's impossible to extract a belle from the Age of Reason.”

“Women will buy products in an attempt to become the impossible goal. Men will buy products in an attempt to mate with the impossible goal.”

“The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world.”

“Girly’ products can spur Japan’s growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the ‘manly’ technologies.”

“In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work published between 1776 and 1788, precisely between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The context is important, as the author Edward Gibbon was examining not only the greatness of Rome, but the forces which brought about its decay.......Gibbon's interpretation of history was controversial, especially in its examination of the growth of Christianity, but his accurate scholarship and engaging prose style have made The Decline and Fall the most enduring work of history in English.In the eighteenth century, history is seen as a branch of belles-lettres, and it subsumes within it scriptural authority on the one hand, and fictional narrative on the other. History is, in effect, the new secular authority of the Enlightenment, and comes to be a very wide-ranging category of writing.”

“He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.”