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.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

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

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.

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.

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.