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.

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.

the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit.

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.

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

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.