Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.

Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

About the scientific revolution: it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes.

If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.