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.

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

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.

General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

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.