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.

Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope, not of despair.

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.

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

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

History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.

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.