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.

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.

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

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

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.

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