I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end.

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

Nothing is more satisfying than to write a good sentence.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.