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.

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

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.

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.

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.