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

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.

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.

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

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

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

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.