You must pursue facts for their own sake, but penetrated with a vivid sense of the problems of your own time. This is not a principle of perversion, but a principle of selection. You must have some principle of selection, and you could not have a better one than to pay special attention to the history of the social problems which are agitating the world now, for you may be sure that they are problems not of temporary but of lasting importance.

Party historians go to the past for party purposes; they seek to read into the past the controversies of the present.

It is a great law of social development that the movement from slavery to freedom is also a movement from security to insecurity of maintenance.

It would be well if, in studying the past, we could always bear in mind the problems of the present, and go to that past to seek large views of what is of last…

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many wa…

In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germa…

But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning tha…