If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!

History repeats itself and History never repeats itself are about equally true.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

I never knew a man go for an honest day's walk for whatever distance, great or small, and not have his reward in the repossession of his soul.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other) I know that I shall have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.