19 Quotes by C. V. Wedgwood

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

General knowledge may have to be slight or even amateurish knowledge, but it is none the less useful, and we discourage it at our peril.

Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature, history cannot be intelligibly written.

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

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.

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always rest in the eye of the beholder; our deductions are so often different it is impossible they should always be right.

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

Democracy, like the human organism, carries within it the seed of its own destruction.

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.