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

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.

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.

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

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

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.