Quotes from C. V. Wedgwood

It should be the historian's business not to belittle but to illuminate the greatness of man's spirit.

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

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.

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.

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

Without passion there might be no errors, but without passion there would certainly be no history.

the independence of the artist is one of the great safeguards of the freedom of the human spirit.

somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man. They need greatness in others and the occasion to discover the greatness in themselves.

Discontent and disorder were signs of energy and hope, not of despair.

An educated man should know everything about something, and something about everything.

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.