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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.