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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.