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.

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?

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.

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.

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

Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories.

True greatness is not about the number of people who serve you. It's about why and how you serve the number of people you serve.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of.

The entertainment business is not the be-all and end-all for me.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Political conflicts distort and disturb a people's sense of distinction between matters of importance and matters of urgency. What is vital is disguised by what is merely a matter of well being.

I'm like a lion - I roar. If someone betrays me, I won't be a victim. I don't sulk, I get angry. I go immediately into retaliation. But it always comes from insecurity or pain.

Bow, bow, ye lower middle classes! Bow, bow, ye tradesmen, bow, ye masses!

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.