The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

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

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

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

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

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