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

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

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

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

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.

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.