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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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