Born on December 4th

"I am a compulsive worker. But I'm also a compulsive relaxer."

"I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates."

"Clark Gable seemed fascinating all his life because there wasn't so much information about him. Today, you're on television all the time."

"I'm so blessed to have such enlightened parents. It must have been very hard to watch their able-bodied son lock himself up in his old room for most of his 20s."

"By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence."

"When most people think of Woodrow Wilson, they see a dour minister's son who never cracked a smile, where in fact he was a man of genuine joy and great sadness."

"There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher."

"I don't know of a soul who packed more living into 72 years than Charles Lindbergh did."

"I think it is important for readers to know that it is possible to bring intellectualism and idealism to the White House and still be political enough to advance an agenda."

"After 'Lindbergh,' my publisher asked whom I wanted to write about next. I said, 'There's one idea I've been carrying in my hip pocket for 35 years. It's Woodrow Wilson.'"

"There are hundreds of books about Woodrow Wilson, but I have an image of him in my mind that is unlike any picture I have seen anywhere else, based on material at Princeton and 35 years of researching and thinking about him."

"I like my subjects to be American, and not too dead, so I can interview people who knew them."

"I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked."

"Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything."

"We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs."

"I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx."

"Almost inevitably there are tensions in the picture, tensions between the outside world and the inside world. For me, a successful picture resolves these tensions without eliminating them."

"In any art, you don't know in advance what you want to say - it's revealed to you as you say it. That's the difference between art and illustration."

"The same liberty that protects me also protects members of the Mafia."

"There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa."

"Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word."

"Dictatorships do cut down on rape, and pillage, not to mention sexual harassment, by the simple expedient of sending people to labour camps for life or cutting off their hands without a trial."

"When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice."

"When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling."

"They are feeding the world that will devour them and their children."

"There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea."

"The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved."

"The People's Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists."

"The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire."

"Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control."