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

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

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

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

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.

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.

Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope, not of despair.