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.

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

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

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.

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

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