The historian, like everyone else, is forever trapped in the egocentric predicament, and 'presentism' is his original sin.

Self-righteousness in retrospect is easy--also cheap,

Feeling its power, one Civil War paper trumpeted that Milton and Homer were for another age but for this one was the New York Herald.

Troubles impending always seem worse than troubles surmounted, but this does not prove that they really are.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

To say that there is a case for heroes is not to say that there is a case for hero worship. The surrender of decision, the unquestioning submission to leadership, the prostration of the average man before the Great Man -- these are the diseases of heroism, and they are fatal to human dignity. History amply shows that it is possible to have heroes without turning them into gods. And history shows, too, that when a society, in flight from hero worship, decides to do without great men at all, it gets into troubles of its own.