All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

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