It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature. – Henry James, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life isnt meant to be easy. Its hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess Im something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another. – Richard M. Nixon

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead. – E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest