Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

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.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

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 selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

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

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.