The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.

Ye diners out from whom we guard our spoons.

History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.