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.

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.

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.

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.

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.

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

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