The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.

From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

A “good” family, it seems, is one that used to be better.

To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse.

Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

Honor wears different coats to different eyes.

A teacher affects eternity.

We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and stimulated the hope of instant results.

For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in.

I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What’s the same and what’s different?

The genius of impeachment lay in the fact that it could punish the man without punishing the office.

Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and, during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a...

Books are humanity in print.

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that’s so striking is the whole area of politics.

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

War is the unfolding of miscalculations.

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.

The fleet sailed to its war base in the North Sea, headed not so much for some rendezvous with glory as for rendezvous with discretion.

To put away one’s own original thoughts in order to take up a book is a sin against the Holy Ghost.

All comparisons between America’s current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the...

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.