C.V. Wedgwood Quotes
An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.
Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.
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.
Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.
Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.
A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.
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.
historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.
Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.
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.
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.
History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.
It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.
the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit.
somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.
History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.
For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.
Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
