A little man often casts a long shadow.
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
An historical event cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than the onion from its skins, because an event is itself nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur.
Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.
History repeats itself and history never repeats itself are about equally true. We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.
I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. After a day's walking, everything has twice its usual value.
If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!
Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.
One half who graduate from college never read another book.
Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.
Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.
The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.
We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers.
You cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. Only politicians adorning their speeches with historical arguments have this power; and even they never agree.
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