“Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art.”

“Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money.”

“In the past few years, genetics have confirmed that the hunter-gatherers were not overwhelmed by the new wave of sedentary farmers, and that the first agricultural revolution spread well in advance of its first users, by contact and trade in ideas. Nice to see science catching up with economics and military history. Any economist could tell you technology spreads beyond its first adopters, even if they stay at home. And any military historian could tell you that, in a contest between people who hunt and kill aurochs and farmers armed with hoes, the smart money is on the hunters.”

“Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life.”

“It was left to the Progressive movement in America (as to the Fabians in Britain) to promote eugenics, Prohibition, dietary fads, the compulsory sterilisation of those they deemed ‘unfit’, and preferential treatment in immigration law of ‘Nordic’ (and preferably Protestant) immigrants.”

“Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft. Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice.”

“Chili is one of those marvelous-simple, elemental, all-important, and fundamental concepts that has been elaborated out of all recognition: rather like justice, or objective reality, or ‘being’ (ens) in Aquinas. Lean closer and I will whisper to you a horrific, soul-shattering secret: there are actually people so lost to any sense of decency that they put beans in chili. (I hope you sent the children of tender years out of the room before we discussed that horror, lest they be warped for life).”