The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.