There is something about guns that inhibits understanding. It is not just that they can put an end to argument. They somehow generate beliefs that are obviously contrary to observable fact.

Thomas Paine, so celebrated and so despised as he traveled through the critical events of his time, has long appealed to biographers. Paine was present at the creation both of the United States and of the French Republic. His eloquence, in the pamphlet 'Common Sense,' propelled the American colonists toward independence.

Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

No one escapes from the past without bearing some of its burdens.

I have - I have more than an interesting task in piloting Wales into our new democracy, without wanting to exercise draconian powers on behalf of anybody else - I can assure of that.

It's fair to say that the policy and character of my government would be, or the government which I lead, would be very different to that of President Trump.

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

This democracy is not by the people, of the people, for the people. This democracy is about by the party high command, of the party high command, and for the party high command.