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.

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

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 is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

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.