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

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

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.

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

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

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.

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