What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.
History is the science of people.
Commonplaces are the tramways of intellectual transportation.
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but... what we ought to avoid.
We need to study the whole of history, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man.