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.

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

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

The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.

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

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