Quotes from G. M. Trevelyan

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

The year 1848 was the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.

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

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

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

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 poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.

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.

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.

A little man often cast a long shadow.

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.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.