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

Before modern times there was Walking, but not the perfection of Walking, because there was no tea.

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

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

The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.