A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an ef….

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit..

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see..

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else..

American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power hou….

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in….

Morality is a private and costly luxury..

Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, we….

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central ….

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts..

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow..

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards;….

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resi….

At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a….

The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand year….

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing….

There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and….

The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you o….

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians..

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated..

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life..