It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

The prophet and the quack are alike admired for a generation, and admired for the wrong reasons.

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.

No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.