Oscar Handlin quotes:

In times of shrinking expectations,... everyone feels like a victim and pushes away outsiders to defend his own corner.

The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.