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 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.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

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

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.

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.

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.