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

History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.

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

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.

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

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

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.