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.

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.

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

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

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

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.