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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.