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

There is no orthodoxy in walking. It is a land of many paths and no-paths, where every one goes his own and is right.

Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.

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.

Village cricket spread fast through the land. In those days before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!

"History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

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