Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

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.

Am I not a man and brother?

A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

International politics, by and large, are a depressing study.

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

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.

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not.

Hope spurs humans everywhere to work harder to endure more now that the future may be better.

You know, we have a fiscal train wreck before us. And unless we act, and act deliberately, we're not going to enable our kids to have what we have. It's plain and simple as that.

Break not an ancient friendship; keep it hale; Stir round its roots, that it be green of heart; Let not the spirit of its growth depart: It is a power to brave the strongest gale.

I've only had one dramatic role in my entire career and when I did it, I was in heaven and I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm going to get more of these.'

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

If we become one of those societies that attack success, why not come as certain there will be a lot less success? And that's not who we are.

You're in for something special!

Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it.

Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn't mean you would stop painting.