We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

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.

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.

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.

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