The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and….

Change is certain. Progress is not..

The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the….

The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.

History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened….

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization..

Good historians, I suspect, whether they think about it or not, have the future in their bones. Besides the question: Why? the historian also asks th….

It is significant that the nationalization of thought has proceded everywhere pari passu with the nationalization of industry..

History consists of a corpus ascertained facts. The facts are available to the historian in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish in the fishm….

History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social….

History in Burckhardt's words is 'the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.' The past is intelligible to us only in light of the pr….

Study the historian before you begin to study the facts..