To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

The Germans could not get over the perfidy of it. It was unbelievable that the English, having degenerated to the stage where suffragettes heckled the Prime Minister and defied the police, were going to fight.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

The fact of being reported increases the apparent extent of a deplorable development by a factor of ten.