International politics, by and large, are a depressing study..

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written..

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things..

the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit..

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a ….

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it….

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything..

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction..

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation..

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the b….

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels..

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics..

General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril..

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example ….

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted w….

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we ….

The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the hum….

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals..

History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents..

Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope, not of despair..

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history..