G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

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.

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

A little man often cast a long shadow.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

There is no orthodoxy in walking. It is a land of many paths and no-paths, where every one goes his own and is right.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.

We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers.

And how fascinating history is - the long, variegated pageant of man's still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out

Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.

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!

Village cricket spread fast through the land.

After a day's walk everything has twice its usual value.

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.

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into peoples minds better than we Liberals.

The ruling classes today nourish the conviction that national hatreds and rivalries are inevitable.

Before modern times there was Walking, but not the perfection of Walking, because there was no tea.

History repeats itself and History never repeats itself are about equally true.

I never knew a man go for an honest day's walk for whatever distance, great or small, and not have his reward in the repossession of his soul.

We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

I have the greatest sympathy with the growth of the socialist party. I think they understand the evils that surround us and hammer them into people's minds better than we Liberals.

There are heartaches in life, painful things that happen and disappointments that steal away dreams.

Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.

...Raleigh was later to write, after a duel the hangman was the one who bestowed the garland on the victor.

Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.