Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, users manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things. – Jonathan Safran Foer

A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life. – Allen Johnson, The Historian and Historical Evidence