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.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

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.

the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit.

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.