For every empire history offers a hundred reasons why it fell, when what we need to know is why it lasted.
Remembering
The obscurest epoch is today.
—Stevenson
The East, the West, the classical and Christian, the medieval and modern, the peasantry, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the 18th, 19th, 20th century — what intellectual malfeasance shelters under the definite article!
What drives the proverbial cycle of good times and hard times? In part weakness and strength, mostly idleness and occupation.
History has been written by the winners, as they were usually literate.
Certain villains achieve martyrdom by the peculiar luck of being murdered by men still more villainous.
The facts I remember are too good to check.
As you grow old, you forget, and as you forget, you have to stop lying, or at least cut way down.
Rogues, dunces, and newspapermen have long been with us, but the rogues are no longer charming, the dunces no longer amiable, and the newspapermen no longer raffish.
We so often demand that the dead meet the standards of the living, and so rarely that the living meet the standards of the dead.
Why speak ill of the dead? It’s the living who cause all the trouble.