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.

For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man. They need greatness in others and the occasion to discover the greatness in themselves.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

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.

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

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.

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.