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

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.

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.

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

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.

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

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