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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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