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

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.

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

It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.

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

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.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.