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.

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

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.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

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

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