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

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

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

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.

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

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.

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