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.

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.

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

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.

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

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.