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

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

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.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

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.

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.