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"Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts."
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"Macy: "In Truth, I said, "there are no rules other than you have to tell the truth.Wes: "How do you win? he askedMacy: "That, I said, "is such a boy question."

"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."

"A false potential can dress itself up as attractive ideas."

"Truth does not sit in a cave and hide like a lie. It wanders around proudly and roars loudly like a lion."

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true."

"Because you're not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are."

"When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took years for me to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me NOT to do. Their main pitch was that achievement equaled happiness, when all you had to do was study rock stars, or movie stars, or them, to see that they were mostly miserable. They were all running around in mazes like everyone else."

"The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit."
Explore more quotes by Samuel E. Morison

"In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not."

"Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."

"Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses."

"The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind."

"Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances."

"With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction."

"Throughout this evolution from left to right, Beard always detested war. Hence his writings were slanted to show that the military side of history was insignificant or a mere reflection of economic forces."

"Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get."

"Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances."
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