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.

General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

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.

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

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.