J. B. Bury quotes:

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.

History is a science, no more and no less.

The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify.

I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.

A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.