General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of monographs on ancient wage levels.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man. They need greatness in others and the occasion to discover the greatness in themselves.

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.