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.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

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

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

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

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.

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