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

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.

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.

Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope, not of despair.

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

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.

It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.