Quotes from Tom Reiss

I feel like history is about going and discovering the great human stories that just are every bit as relevant as anything that's going on today.

Remembering people is the most fundamental gesture of love and respect. For me, there are people in my life who are no longer with me, who have died, who are with me as much as any living person because I remember everything about them. My great-uncle, who I got a lot of guidance in life from, meant so much to me.

In 1817, Czar Alexander I personally founded the Society of Israelite Christians but had less luck defeating Judaism than he'd had defeating Napoleon; gentile serfs and merchants in areas bordering the Pale even showed disturbing new signs of 'Judaizing.'

My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough.

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.

The first time I dedicated myself to resurrecting and preserving somebody's memories was with my great-uncle. I knew he was going to die in the next few years, and I had grown up listening to all his stories about people who had been trapped or chased by the Nazis. I began to record them.

When Czar Ivan III took a liking to the Judaizers, they were invited to Moscow, where they managed to convert so much of the court nobility in the last decades of the fifteenth century that traditionalists felt the need to counter the trend through selective burnings at the stake.

Since 2002, there has been a wave of attacks against Jewish 'persons or property' in France, a great many of them committed by young men living outside Paris, in the vast ghettos called les banlieues.

I am definitely of the method-acting school. Everything to me is about sound. I don't dress up in period costumes or anything like that. I'm very aural. When I'm working, I try to soak up the sounds of an era.

The Dumas memoirs - which I also discovered when I was a kid - had a big impact on me.

'The Secret Agent' remains the most brilliant novelistic study of terrorism as viewed from the blood-spattered outside. But 'Under Western Eyes' dares to leap inside - not only into the terrorist mind, but also into the troubled zone that divides West from East, 'the autocracy in mystic vestments.'

While writing 'The Orientalist,' I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

Conservatism as a formal political doctrine didn't exist in America in 1940. The word 'conservative' was associated primarily with fringe groups - anti-industrial Southern agrarians and the anti-New Deal tycoons who led the Liberty League.

Until 2005, France had the only senior Catholic prelate in modern times who was born Jewish and still considered himself culturally Jewish: Cardinal Lustiger.

I'm going to heaven! I replied. -What do you mean, you're going to heaven? -Let me pass. -And what will you do in heaven, my poor child? -I'm going there to kill God, who killed Daddy.

GENERAL, I have learned that the jack ass whose business it is to report to you upon the battle of the 27th [the 27 Nivôse, i.e., January 16] stated that I was only in observation throughout the battle. I don't wish any such observation on him, for he would have shit in his pants. Salute and Brotherhood! ALEX. DUMAS

Unhappiness cannot but draw tighter the bonds which hold us fast to one another, General Dumas had written to Marie-Louise as he made his way home.

Indeed, who has a greater right to public respect than the man of color fighting for freedom after having experienced all the horrors of slavery? To equal the most celebrated warriors he need only keep in mind all the evils he has suffered.

But his main character flaw was that of so many French revolutionaries: a zeal for human rights so self-righteous that it translated into intolerance for the actual human beings around him. Brissot

While Americans view the Revolutionary War as a conflict fought from Maine to Florida, France actually forced Britain to fight the Revolution as a world war, defending its outposts in India, Jamaica, and Africa. The British had to divert most of their celebrated navy from the American coast to defend against French attacks elsewhere.‡

the former King Louis XVI, who, after titles were abolished, was now simply called Louis Capet - a mocking reference to his distant ancestor Hugh Capet, who had assumed the throne in the year 987.

But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level. ... The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris.

The Republic can count on me to battle its enemies... Offensive war suits the passionate character of the French, but it is the responsibility of the man in charge of leading them to prepare with caution and wisdom everything that leads to victory.

Many of the Founding Fathers themselves foresaw that their compromise with southern states was a poison pill that would eventually lead to tragedy. But the French stalwarts of the new America found every way of glossing over the problem. Paris theaters staged plays about the idyllic life in Virginia, where black slaves and their masters sang songs of liberty as they worked together side by side.