Sir John Robert Seeley

“What is a great man? He is a man who knows the mind of his own time.”

“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”

“History, while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a practical object.”

“History is past politics, and politics present history.”

“History is the school of statesmanship.”

“So long as we continue to think of politics as a list of subjects for parliamentary debate, so long as we think of it as a contention between parties, we shall never have a science of politics.”

“The student of history is a politician with his work in the past, the politician a historian with his work in the future.”

“Biography is the home-made history, the home-baked bread of history.”

“No one is so certain of the necessity of a thing as the man who is ignorant of it.”