Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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