For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

Every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away.

Controlling my temper is important, ... Sometimes it's hard, but I try.

All kinds of beauty do not inspire love; there is a kind which only pleases the sight, but does not captivate the affections.

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

I shall be as secret as the grave.