C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

We have more to learn today from the spectacle of a great man at a great moment than from any number of…

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression…

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher…

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man.…

— C. V. Wedgwood

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the…

— C. V. Wedgwood

History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political…

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who…

— C. V. Wedgwood

For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source…

— C. V. Wedgwood

All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is…

— C. V. Wedgwood

My own varying estimates of the facts themselves, as the years passed, showed me too clearly how much of history must always…

— C. V. Wedgwood

The individual - stupendous and beautiful paradox - is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

— C. V. Wedgwood

The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his…

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood

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

— C. V. Wedgwood