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

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.

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.

General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

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.

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

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