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.

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.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

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

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

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