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

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

For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man. They need greatness in others and the occasion to discover the greatness in themselves.

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

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

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

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.