One learns more from defeat than from victory.

A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. . . . A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

If the European discovery had been delayed for a century or two, it is possible that the Aztec in Mexico or the Iroquois in North America would have established strong native states capable of adopting European war tactics and maintaining their independence to this day, as Japan kept her independence from China.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.