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

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

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

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.

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

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.

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