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.

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

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.

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

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

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.