Veronica Wedgwood Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

Veronica Wedgwood
The historian ought to be the humblest of men; he is faced a dozen times a day with the evidence of his own ignorance; he is perpetually confronted with his own humiliating inability to interpret his material correctly; he is, in a sense that no other writer is, in bondage to that material.

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

Veronica Wedgwood
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.

Veronica Wedgwood
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.

Veronica Wedgwood
For the company of the great is good company as Shakespeare understood it, as Plutarch understood it. The past remains the source from which example and precept can still be drawn.

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

Veronica Wedgwood
Somewhere about the eighteenth century, history tacitly replaced religion as the school of public morals.

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

Veronica Wedgwood
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.

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

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

Veronica Wedgwood
History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.

Veronica Wedgwood
Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

Veronica Wedgwood