As a teenager he had observed that success bred presumption and that presumption bred inattention. On the other hand misfortune fostered care and vigilance, by which losses might be reversed.

Judging by the edicts passed to regulate commerce alone, Franklin stood ready to conclude that an assembly of wise men is the greatest fool upon earth.

In Europe pedigree might be all, but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he...

When men of sober age travel, they gather knowledge which they may apply usefully for their country; but they are subject ever after to recollections mixed with regret; their affections are weakened...

What good were these experiments?" went the skeptic's question. To which Franklin replied, "What good is a new-born babe?" In some versions he continued: "He may be an imbecile, or a man of great...

Our appetite for the miraculous endures; we continue to want there to be something beyond our ken. We hope to locate the secret powers we didn't know we had, like the ruby slippers Dorothy finds on...

Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another. Often what pinches and pricks,...

Never had he sounded so much like one of his characters, brought down by his passion, unable to escape his own private abyss, heartrendingly separated from his own self-image

With her death Egypt became a Roman province. It would not recover its autonomy until the twentieth century.

...but from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home.

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We

He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.

To one visitor Alexandrian life was just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.

Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't...

Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

In this world," he reminded a French friend, "it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.