There are people here of the highest education who are not less irritated if you touch what they call their golden age.

The fault is in the education that is given in this country.

All history is a lie, and to know it so misrepresented it would be far better not to know it at all.

In the schools the past of the country is taught from the point of view of a savage, who appreciates a thing because it shines and not because of its worth or utility.

Spain was great, and was on the high road to become the first nation in the world, by solid and positive merits that the hazards of war or policy could not have destroyed; but that was before the centuries that you praise, before the times of the foreign kings: in the Middle Ages which held great hopes, which have vanished since the consolidation of national unity.