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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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